[PLUG] anyone got a 250meg Iomega ZIP drive?

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Jeme" == Jeme A Brelin <jeme at brelin.net> writes:

Russell> That is starting to sound like a drive failure rather than a
Russell> media failure.  A new drive is around $60 or $100.  Before we
Russell> buy one, does someone have one we could try one of the disks
Russell> in?  Alternatively, has anyone seen one at FreeGeek's thrift
Russell> store?

Jeme> Could this be the notorious "Click Death" that plagues IOmega
Jeme> Zip and Jaz drives? [...]

Nope, no clicking really in evidence.  After downloading a KNOPPIX
image and burning it to CD (is there a reason that Mozilla downloads
abort when the screen saver kicks in on w2k?), dd'ing from /dev/sda4
to a file, I got to about sector 246xxx before the read failed.
Seeking past it by 8 sectors, I could read a varying number of blocks
before getting another read error.  Always, skipping 8 sectors let me
read more data.  I was on chunk 7 when I learned that the data still
existed on the hard disk so actual recovery wasn't necessary.  When
switching media, we found that the errors didn't start occurring until
similarly near the middle of the media.

In addition to the one noted above, the KNOPPIX burning sub-project
had another surprise: cygwin's rsync would recreate all of the
pre-existing data, but then stall before actually making any progress
in completing the file.  That is, mozilla's download had aborted at,
say, 200meg.  Rsync would (with the --progress option) furiously
recreate the amount of data already present, then basically stop.
This was violated the principle of least astonishment.  I eventually
installed cygwin's wget and used the -c (continue) option, which
worked.


-- 
Russell Senior         ``I have nine fingers; you have ten.''
seniorr at aracnet.com