While we are talking about data recovery, a friend has passed me
this Seagate ST3491A 428MB drive which is obviously dead - and he
would rather re-key the billing data that's on it than pay the
600-1000 ukp quoted as a data recovery fee. Symptoms are...

Disk spins up, heads step across smoothly, then a pause
 - and then the drive begins a slow, rhythmic clonking,
presumably the heads hitting the end stop.

I've had this kind of fault on drives of my own before.

Obviously quite a lot of the drive is working for this to happen:
can an expert suggest a likely cause of this type of failure?

Len Warner <[log in to unmask]> WWW Pager http://wwp.mirabilis.com/10120933