[penguicon-general] OT: Help! A Story Problem for you Smart Masses

[Robert Meier]

Steve,

> The Problem: Now, when you turn your external hard drive,
> only the light in front come on.
> No happy whirring sounds. No contented humming.
> No vibration from spinning disks. No data access...

Spinning disks is a requirement, so consider how to get the disks spinning.

An external disk is usually a hard disk simply mounted in a small
standalone case without motherboard.  Diagnosis and repair is the
same as for an internal disk.

<HINT>
Before the puppy arrived, were the disks "whistling" (at a frequency
higher than a normal speaking voice).

Have you openned the external disk case?
Was the power cord securely plugged into the disk?
Was the data cable securely plugged into the disk?
(With a multimeter), did you measure proper voltage on the power cable?

Do you have another external disk?
Can you plug the second disk into the computer?
Does the second disk spin, mount, give you data access?

Did you try a second data cable for external drive?
Is the data cable from the external interface securely plugged into
the computer?

Did you open up the computer case?
Is the data cable from the external interface securely plugged into
the motherboard(?)?
</HINT>

Hopefully helpful,
-- 
Robert Meier

"To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's
fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern,
politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found
themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system
(viz. society) with no documentation or instruction of any kind, and so
whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce
certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanic rigor, because they were at
a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm.
Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system
administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least
had some documentation, som FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing
some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack.  They were, in
other words, capable of displaying adaptability."
      -- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon, p.585