Oddball hard drive failure...

[Jules Richardson]

Christian Corti wrote:
>> Anyone seen this particular mode of failure before? It's a new one on 
>> me...
> 
> Oh yes... I have an HP 97536-60051 ESDI hard disk with the same 
> symptoms. The magnets are painted black and this paint flaked off (into 
> lots of tiny bits and also into dust). But the paint seems to be 
> magnetic as the flakes and (most of) the dust stick on the magnets and 
> are hard to remove (even with a brush and vacuum cleaner).

Exactly the same with my drive. Cleaning the top magnet wasn't so bad as I 
could take it to the sink to do it and really work at it, but I couldn't do 
much for the lower one - and obviously removing the whole head assembly is a 
bad idea ;)

I don't think it's a failure mode I've ever seen mentioned on the list before. 
I wonder it's it's one that's going to become more and more common as the 
drives age, though? :-(