InnerDrive boot up problem...

[twdorr01@starbase.spd.louisville.edu (Thomas Dorris)]

Well, it finally happened...  I've had my InnerDrive 40 Meg hard drive
from Applied Ingenuity since September 21, 1989 and it finally went
belly up (just a few weeks short of its 5 year anniversary).  It did
so gracefully, however, and I'd like to know if there's someway I can
extend its life a little more....
  
Apparently the only function of the hard drive of which I no longer
have use is its "boot-up" capability.  I can not do a PR#7 or have the
drive selected as the bootup slot.  Either of these situations produces
the same result...a dump into the monitor at address 0801 as soon as the
drive is accessed.  I've been able to determine  (by switching with a
known-to-function controller card) that the controller card is not at
fault.  I've done a full surface analysis and self-test using the
disk utilities provided with the harddrive when I first bought it...no
help there either.
   
At first this seemed like an absolute catastophe and the last
straw in my effort to resist buying an IBM, but fortunately when
I booted up from a 3.5" disk and then ran PRODOS off my /D volume (the
first partition of my hard drive) everything came up just fine!  So
my solution for the time being is to write a short system file that will
prefix to /D and run prodos.  I'll put that on my 3.5" bootup disk in
place of BASIC.SYSTEM and set the control panel to boot up from slot 5
instead of 7.  Viola, almost normal again, but I'd rather fix the problem
with the drive...
    
Anybody got any ideas?  Has one of the wires in the ribbon running from
the controller card to the drive gone bad?  Is this a common thing for
a 5 year old InnerDrive?  Any hints or suggestions will be greatly
appreciated.  Thanks.
     
ThomasD