[shadowman]

I nearly lost my SNAP OS on my original MATOR 80gb. The drive was making a clicking noise and BIOS had trouble detecting the drive. I recalled a little trick a friend told me about how to restore temporary access to clicking hard drive.

You first need to place the drive in a antistatic bag and make to sure remove as much air as possible from the bag. Seal it up with tape. Place the drive in the freezer for 15-20minutes. Setup your cloning station using Digital Dolly, Knoppix and/or other cloning software. Remove your drive and install quickly to perform your cloning process on your spare hard drive. Even though the cloning process may stall after 5-10 minutes, because the hard drive will begin to thaw out. Don't panic you only need the first 20-25 megs of the hidden boot partition of the SNAP drive (this is where the SNAP OS resides). Go ahead and stop the cloning process. Stick in your newly cloned drive. If you see blinking lights go ahead and get the troubleshooting guide to see what they are. Login to your SNAP server and most likely you need to format and reinit your new drive using Config Debug of SNAP.

Now if I could only get down the procedure to copy the boot tracks if this drive does fail on me and I can be prepared in the future. I have tried to no avail.

This forum is great. A lot of experience from all types of problem and solutions that is a great arsenal of knowledge for any technician.

SM