I should have known... How many times has this nerd heard that sound before? That ever so subtle click or hesitation during boot-up... You tell yourself you're crazy...
"Just hearing things." you say. But of all the times I've "wondered" about a hard drive before, it always turned out I should have gone with my gut. When you know a computer inside and out you start to anticipate what it will do. The boot up sounds of a hard drive never change unless something is wrong. When you feel something is wrong, it's time to backup your shit.
The problem is it's never so obvious. The death of a hard drive is rarely a fast thing, not when you look back on it. You "should" have known, but you just turn your head and listen carefully... Everything seems to work just fine and you forget about it. I've known this was coming and yet it was a complete shock to me. Turned on the Amiga tonight only to hear a screeching and pounding noise that made me just about have a heart attack.
It's pretty obvious at that point... You know it's dead but you turn it off and back on just to make sure... Oh yeah... But I refuse to go down without a fight! I took apart the GVP hard drive casing, got the SCSI hard drive out... Took the cover off which involved a drill when two of the screws refused to come out... Looked okay inside... Blew it out a little... Gave it a friendly shake... Hooked it up to the Amiga as loosely as possible... Turned it on...
Nothing... Damn GVP thing needs the "game/boot" switch plugged in... AND THEN... Some life... Made it to the Workbench shell before saying Workbench had a read/write error and giving me the Red Screen of Amiga Death. Oh no, it got further than last time... Now I KNEW I was onto something!
The hard drive itself is a 500mb SCSI drive made by Quantum (in very small print) for Apple (in very BIG print) with a date of 1994. So we're not dealing with the original drive by any means. But a drive from 1994 is not exactly young... The good news I was thinking is that all the subtle bad noise I was hearing over the last few weeks was only heard during boot up. Once the thing got going everything was fine... I had a gut feeling if I could just jump start the thing into life it would be fine as long as it remained on.
So I just tried putting the drive in a few positions... I hooked up the good old transfer serial cable for Amiga in anticipation for a backup party. And I got the old girl to boot up! I was hoping to just get enough life out of it to boot to workbench with a floppy and save the most important stuff. She booted up all on her own with no read/write errors... Sounds like she always had... I'm thinking it's just age and that bootup sequence getting to her. With it jump started I'm betting it'll run fine just as long as the Amiga is on. I transfered the more important save game info/documents that were not a part of the the last backup just fine...
Now I'm going for the full backup. The last time I backed up the hard drive it took a good week via that serial cable, which is essentially a dialup connection to my Windows98 machine using Amiga Forever. I selected everything and sent it over... Over an hour later she's going strong with no signs of quitting. Pretty sure this story is going to have a happy ending. I'll just find myself another SCSI drive or maybe an adapter to use an IDE one once everything gets backed up and I'll transfer everything back. Perhaps I'll do a couple things differently, we'll see. Wonder how much that GVP hardware can handle in terms of drive capacity. Hmmm... I have more IDE drives than I know what to do with but I don't "think" I have too many SCSI drives anymore... Time to dig through some boxes.
Not out of the woods yet but I'm breathing easier. It's a thing that's possible with old hardware... But as long as I can get a hold of them I'll still be happy with the old hard drives just like I'm happy with the old floppy disks. I'll be kicking and screaming to a flash drive solution. I'm sure there will be more to come on this... Maybe a video, maybe a new post all together. I've got my Pool of Radiance saves (the game I've been working on reviewing) so that was the most important thing to me... Without those I may have quit YouTube right then... I've put too much into that game to have that crap happen to me. But I'm pretty sure I'll get it all back. Will keep the site updated.