[H-GEN] Is my portable drive dead?

[Benjamin Fowler]

On 6 August 2012 00:22, Russell Stuart <russell-humbug at stuart.id.au> wrote:

> On Mon, 2012-08-06 at 00:11 +0100, Benjamin Fowler wrote:
> > Given how modern drives reallocate bad blocks, I hoped to try and
> > force the drive to reallocate the bad sectors, like so:
> >
> >          dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sde conv=sync,noerror
>  >
> > But alas, it pukes with:
> >
> >         dd: writing to `/dev/sde': Input/output error
> >         265+0 records in
> >         264+0 records out
> >         135168 bytes (135 kB) copied, 2.57017 s, 52.6 kB/s
> >
> > So, is there anything else I can try, in order to salvage this drive,
>
> Not off the top of my head.
>
> >  or shall I just give it a decent burial?
>
> Don't bury it!  It contains neodymium magnets.  They are useful for all
> sorts of things.
>
>
It had crossed my mind, that it might be a fun thing to try, to rip out the
spindle motor and voice coil, and see if I can get them to do something
interesting with them on my breadboard.

I've seen some crazy hacks on YouTube, where people have managed to drive
stepper motors, with mirrors glued to them to draw a crude laser light
show... Certainly one possible way to reincarnate this pile of junk into
something useful!

Cheers, Ben.
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