[CUBE] Still having problems with Cube Hard Drives

[Meirion Roscoe]

Maybe a crazy idea, but have you checked all the wiring looms and pins 
in the connectors thoroughly.  Intermittent faults have a very strange 
way of manifesting themselves sometimes.  The original drive may have 
been installed badly and damaged something but still remained working.  
When you swapped drives this may have aggrivated the situation.  It may 
be indirectly due to heat as a fault such as a cold soldered joint will 
usually only show up (or conversely, cure itself) when the joint gets 
warm.  If you have spare cables/dc-dc boards/motherboards/daughter 
boards/ granny boards!!, anything - try changing them on a modular 
rotation basis to discount any faults in other areas affecting your 
hard drive.

You may be surprised at where the fault actually lies!

Hope this helps - don't know much about OS or non-tangibles - just a 
hardware dummy!


Cheers


Rossi
On Tuesday, May 13, 2003, at 16:30 Europe/London, Randy Spencer wrote:

> It's been almost a year since I got the power button problem fixed on 
> my
> Cube fixed and I have now tried 5 different hard drives as potential
> upgrades to my stock Cube.  All of them WD or Seagate 80 gig drives 
> except a
> WD 120 gig I got in the last few weeks.  Every single one of them 
> exhibits
> the same symptom.  They install flawlessly, run the OS for quite some 
> time
> (days) and then choke.  Usually they freeze the system followed by have
> progressively more and more problems recovering from the crash until 
> the
> drive will no longer boot.  The drives often will make a knocking 
> sound when
> they cannot boot.  I even get a circle with a diagonal bar thru it
> (universal "No") symbol when it get's this bad, I have never seen this 
> boot
> icon on Macs before.
>
> Now the weird part:  If I take the drive out, put it in another Mac 
> and run
> First Aid on it (from Disk Copy) it claims no problems and the drive 
> will
> come right back up when put back in the Cube.  Sometimes all I need to 
> do is
> remove and reinstall the drive to get it to work again.  I have tried
> leaving the case off and was able to recover the drive once by simply
> unhooking the power and data cables and plugging them back in without
> unhooking anything else.
>
> The original 20 Gig that came with the Cube works just fine all the 
> time,
> except it is always full.  I can leave it running tests for weeks 
> without a
> problem.  It is also not a heat problem as the Thermoindock claims the
> ambient temps are identical using all of the hard drives (20c to 40c). 
> Could my power supply be too wimpy for the big drives?
>
> Anyone on this list live in the East Bay of SF?  I would love to loan 
> you my
> hard drives to test for a few days...
>
>   -Randy
>
>
>
>
>
> =====
> ¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°
> Randy Spencer (510) 769-1949 AIM:RanSpen Citrus Insight #5427
>  http://geocities.com/israndy
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
> http://search.yahoo.com
>
> ----------
> Check out the Cube email list FAQ
> http://www.themacintoshguy.com/lists/Cube.html
>
> To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <Cube-off at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
> To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to 
> <Cube-digest at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
> Need help from a real person? Try.  
> <Cube-request at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
>
> ----------
> $14.99 Unlimited Nationwide Mac Dialup and Mac Web Hosting from your 
> Mac ISP
> Serious Mac Internet Solutions From NineWire!   
> http://macinternetaccess.com
>
>  T3Hub  |  3 Port USB Hub weighs less than an ounce!
> Dr. Bott|   <http://www.drbott.com/prod/T3Hub.html>
>
>    Cyberian   | Support this list when you buy at Outpost.com!
>    Outpost    | http://www.themacintoshguy.com/outpost.shtml
>
> ADC Extension | Extend the built in cable of your flat panel by 10 ft.
>   Dr. Bott    |    <http://www.drbott.com/prod/ADCExtension.html>
>