Re: Focus Drive //e woes

[Jerry <SNIPawanderin@yahoSNIPo.ca>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> William Katz wrote:
>> So I decided to turn on my Apple //e computer two days ago, after having
>> it sit on my desk for about ~2 years.
>> Everything seems to work except one part... my Focus Drive //e!! :(
>> 
>> I turn on the //e, and for the first one or two seconds, it sounds like
>> the Focus Drive will boot up (I can hear the hard drive whirring), but
>> then the computer just sits there with the 'Apple //e' title on the
>> screen.
[...]

>>  I have also *not* tried to put the hard
>> drive in an ibm computer and see if any disk checking utilities would fix
>> it?
> 
> That wouldn't help, since PC utilities only "fix" disks with PC
> formatting.  It would be a way to do a low-level format, but that
> is almost certainly not the problem.

If you buy the SpinRite program from Steve Gibson (http://grc.com/), it can
fix a somewhat damaged hard drive.  It runs on a PC, but does not care what
the high-level filesystem information is, as it talks to the drive
controller and does its work that way.  I have used this software to repair
drives that seemed completely gone and was delighted to have the data back.


Jerry