Witness the death click of a Maxtor hard drive

This Heatwave from a couple of weeks back really seems to be a problem. I came into the office on Monday and it was absolutely boiling hot in there after the whole weekend. We have a couple of servers in a rack and one of them was whining away. It was totally hung, and when I rebooted it my heart sank as it said missing NT loader. So I left it off for a while and thank god it booted up.
It really makes me consider getting a some air conditioning for the office or the cabinet ? I don?t want to go to the expense of some industrial stuff so I had a look around and you can get a decent little portable air conditioner unit from http://www.iceboys.co.uk I am thinking that this would certainly help things without costing the earth. Of course, nothing replaces a good backup strategy, but it is really about the inconvenience as well .

I took a "clicking" Maxtor diamondMax drive, and used an upside down can of air duster and directly froze the circuit board. Rebooted the machine and it booted right into Windows. The entire circuit board was frosted over with frozen condensation. Over the next minute or so, there was one particular integrated circuit that dissipated the frost faster than the others. Once that IC was clear of frost, the clicking started again, and Windows froze. I powered down the system, refroze the drive, and booted to Windows again. This time, I kept refreezing the circuit board. I was able to keep the system up and running for about 20 minutes, while I recovered my very first MP3 collection. I learned this trick doing component level repair on CRT monitors. Find the part that gets too hot, replace it, and you have a working monitor... that will be $129.99, thank you, drive through.

We do see alot of these problems. On certain hard drives it is possible to swap the PCB, but with most western digital or the newer seagate drives it is not possible. THe firmware on the boards are unique to translator codes in these drives.

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