Falcon hard drive failure?

[gozar]

I bought a Falcon awhile ago off of Ebay, and was able to play around with it for a while. I put it aside, and now when I boot it up it's not recognizing the hard drive. I'd hate to have had the hard drive fail before I was able to back it up (it came with some interesting software, including Cubase (with the dongle)).

 

Anything I should try before I just replace it?

 

Should I replace it with a ide->CF adapter or just go with an IDE flash drive?

[ggn]

I bought a Falcon awhile ago off of Ebay, and was able to play around with it for a while. I put it aside, and now when I boot it up it's not recognizing the hard drive. I'd hate to have had the hard drive fail before I was able to back it up (it came with some interesting software, including Cubase (with the dongle)).

 

Anything I should try before I just replace it?

 

Hmm, tough call. Does it make weird noises when you power it on? Continious? Just some click-click-click and then it stops?

 

From my experience, on extreme cases (like "I'll bin it, so let's try anything" !), I tapped lightly (and then with more force) the disk and it started reacting. However I should point out that I got pretty desparate, so I don't recommend it tbh (like I said, something to do in lieu of anything else! Try to exhaust any other options first!)

 

Should I replace it with a ide->CF adapter or just go with an IDE flash drive?

 

Well, a cf adapter is silent and works reliably, albeit a tad slow. I never tried ide flash drives but I suspect the same. A 2.5" ide disk is a bit more noisy (but not much), and it's lightning fast. Make your choice, although I have a 60gb ide drive on my falcon and it works brilliantly! (and hey! Aren't 2.5" disks silly cheap these days? )

[jens]

Did you already try to just re-install the hard disk driver?

 

Also, you could rotate the drive in order to remind if of the fact it has to spin.

Sometimes the read/write-heads are sticking on the surface of the storage disk, so this might help (as it did for two of my drives).

 

As replacement I'd recommend a hard drive as well, 120 gigs are just fine in a Falcon. :-)