23.024 What is the "Click of Death" reported by some Zip drive users?
Description
This article is from the Apple II Csa2 FAQ, by Jeff Hurlburt with numerous contributions by others.
23.024 What is the "Click of Death" reported by some Zip drive users?
Your drive starts to make a clicking sound and soon fails. Disks in a
drive which Clicks may be corrupted and, if placed in a good drive, may cause a
good drive to start Clicking.
The clicking sound is what you hear when the drive head hits a mechanical
stop when it fails to detect and stop at track Zero. Repeated hits lead to
misalignment or, even, a broken head and disk tearing.
If your Zip drive starts to click, the standard recommendation is that you
immediately eject the disk or, if this is not possible, turn OFF power to the
drive (or pull out the power connector on the side of the drive). This may
save the drive if the disk is bad or save the disk if the drive has gone bad.
The "Click" has been laid to one or more of several possible causes:
1. Misalignment due to bumping while being carried around
2. Exposure to magnetic fields from monitors and (internal Zips) un-shielded
power supplies
3. Faulty or 'weak' drives which got past quality control
4. Use of non-Iomega drivers for accessing and/or formatting Zip disks.
Regarding use of non-Iomega drivers: SuperTimer, I, and other users have
done low-level formats and partitioning of several Zip disks on drives
connected to the IIgs and used the disks with no problems.
By: Scott Alfter
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