testosterone and risk

so I had this hard drive.. scsi hard drive.. that wouldn't work. I couldn't get it to mount

so I was like... what the hell... so I tried formatting it with all these different utilities, but no dice... this is on a legacy Macintosh.

it was an old-ass 40MB hard drive

so finally I noticed that this 16 conductor ribbon.. not a ribbon cable, but a flat piece of flexible plastic with traces etched on it... two of the traces were broken because the ribbon was ripped... the ribbon that ran from the controller card into the drive...

so I open up the drive, and I find the chip that the traces go to. So it was pretty tiny. Fortunately this was legacy, so it was not yet so tiny you couldn't work with it. So I soldered on some large (relative to the chip, anyway) gauge wire... probably like 24 gauge phone wire or something... I soldered it onto the two pins that the broken traces went to, and I soldered the other ends of the wires to the back of the connector on the controller card that the ribbon plugged into

so after that, the hard drive started making sounds like it was trying to be alive, which it didn't do before, but it seemed like the read/write head was stuck

so there is this lightweight plastic lever that is activated by the air drafting off of the rotation of the disk... maybe because I had the cover off it wasn't working, so I pinned it 'open' with a paperclip, and voila! the hard drive was alive!

it was some hard drive that used to belong to someone who apparently lived in Minnessota. there wasn't much on it, except an essay about how great Jessi Ventura was as a gubenatorial candidate. hilarious stuff.

So I scanned the drive for erased files, didn't find much, it was surprisingly clean. I guess someone bought a computer and never used it for much.

so then I salvaged the magnets from the hard drive. I don't know if newer hard drives all have these but the old hard drives have one or usually a pair of super strong permantent magnets, that the read/write head plays off of the field to move around.

I know right you're like what the fuck is a petmantent magnet doing in a hard dirve

well it's glued to a metal backing strip with a super strong glue and I guess the metal is some special anti-magnetic metal or something to insulate and drive the magnetic field in a certain way so it don't fuck with the disk. or maybe it is pro-magnetic and it's shape just drives the field a certain way so it flows not on the disk

I guess most people have pretty mundane and boring lives when I go through an old hard drive I never seem to find anything too interesting

this one time I called up this lady and I was like "hey I have your old computer what the fuck is up with this I bought it on ebay" and she was like "OMG my boss told me it would be erased" and I was like "bitch your e-mail is all on it still and it's all boring except for Jeff Smith that guy is kind of creepy how he keeps being overly friendly with you in e-mail he has some kind of personality disorder or something" and she's like "I know right!" and then I'm like "I see you have all his e-mails saved in a separate folder basically all you had to do was tell him to fuck off but instead you were going to try to get him fired because your life is so boring and pathetic that this would be the only thing that would give it meaning would be to try to destroy the life of some random colleague I hope if you get him fired that he stalks you and rapes you and murders you in the back of his van because that is what you deserve bitch" and she didn't say anything and I was like "bitch you heard me you heard what I said and you can't say anything because you know it's true that's what you deserve" and then I was like "so anyway I need to format this drive do you want me to rapidshare you an image of it first?" and she was like "no that's okay you can just erase it I don't need anything on it" and I was like "cool, just checking, mainly I just wanted to make sure it wasn't a stolen computer because this guy I bought it from on ebay was kind of shady in fact I was kind of hoping it was stolen so I could nail him on that because he lied in his listing about how much memory it had. Okay well thanks anyway." and then we hung up.

so anyway. I felt good about doing two good deeds of not only making sure it wasn't a stolen or lost computer and that no one needed their files off of it, but also I helped out Jeff from possibly getting fired. Later on I called Jeff and gave him the phone number for the employee counseling service of the University where he works. A lot of employers have those now. A lot of employers are recognizing that an ounce of prevention in the mental health arena can save them a ton of money later on in lost producivity, employee suicides and postalsides.

okay, that is my story about the hard drive I am proud that I hacked it to be working again with low level component repairs.