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Zip & Jaz Drive Click Death Research |
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Hi, Steve Gibson here ... As you probably know by now, SpinRite 5.0 now runs on the very popular ZIP and JAZ drives. This is especially interesting since these drives are beginning to experience a strange type of problem: Some form of still-mysterious "disease" befalls some Zip and Jaz drives, causing all or part of the data on the removable cartridges to become unreadable and inaccessible. Iomega Corporation has reportedly finally acknowledged this problem. PC World Magazine and "BugNet" have both reported:
Ziff-Davis/PC Week's Jim Louderback first broke the story of this problem in his February 17th, 1998 column which included a link to one of the several web sites which has been tracking this rapidly growing problem. That site also maintains a mailing list which has been joined by more than 3100 people. Reading through the message board on that site is shocking and frightening. When we learned of this problem and Jim's column, we contacted Jim and told him of SpinRite 5.0's new ability to run on Iomega drives. Jim posted a note about this to the Click Death mailing list which generated more than 280 requests for a beta copy of SpinRite 5.0. Beta copies were sent ... We first learned of SpinRite's ability to be effective in helping with cases of Click Death when we received this letter (Reprinted here with the permission of its author):
Others are. But in order for SpinRite to work on a Zip or Jaz drive, the drive must first be "online" ... and one of the failure modes created by "Click Death" takes the drive completely offline. If any part of the drive is accessible, then SpinRite is already the best tool in existence for repairing the damage and recovering the data. But I want to really understand what's going on so that I can perhaps find a way of bringing those completely "offline" Zip and Jaz drives "online" just enough for SpinRite to be able to get in there and make them whole again. Because I feel that this is a significant problem (as do 100,000 victims!) I have committed myself to getting to the bottom of this Click Death problem. I have asked the community of Click Death sufferers to send me their dead Iomega disks and drives, and I'm receiving them now. I'm tracking down an Iomega technical reference manual (which is not publicly available) which will give me some inside knowledge that Iomega is unwilling to share. As soon as the dust settles from the introduction of this major new release of SpinRite, I'll be rolling up my sleeves, getting out my oscilloscope, and determining what's really going on. As I learn more I'll be updating my project diary to reflect everything that I learn, whether it's relevant to SpinRite or not. I am hoping to create a supplementary utility (which I would give away freely) specifically targeted to this problem and which might work in concert with the existing SpinRite product (which is already as good as it can be for what it does.) If you would like to be notified automatically whenever I make a worthwhile discovery, you are hereby invited to subscribe to the GRC Corporate News Blog.
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