🚀 go-pugleaf

A friend's hard drive (Jasmine 20) has gone through a pattern of failure
that will sound familiar to those following the recent thread on hard
disk failures: it spins, but doesn't boot up. It did this intermittently
for several months, and then failed completely.

A local repair shop says the only way to fix it is to replace the drive
itself: $400. They've said that the power supply and controller
electronics are just fine. The old drive is a standard 20meg Seagate
drive -- so my question is, can we just go out and buy a new 20meg
Seagate drive and plug it in? I see these drives advertised in PC
magazines for about $220-240 -- why should this cost $400? (Obviously at
that price, she'll just buy a new drive, a la Chuq.)

What is everyone else doing with their broken disk drives?

--david

dba+@andrew.cmu.edu