Same here. Thirty years later, I'm still reeling from the loss of an inestimable trove of software created between the late Seventies and the early Nineties (many now-defunct operating systems, extremely rare programs and so on). All that on a 800MB Conner drive, which I had installed as a secondary (non-boot) drive in my system. The drive died on me with absolutely no warning signs, something that was unusual even for that period of time - it simply disappeared from the OS/BIOS, less that a year after I bought it.
hilbert42|11 months ago
Except for the drive killed by the dropped manual, that's essentially what happened to the others—about a dozen or so. They just stopped working, either they wouldn't start on boot or they'd just become inaccessible during operation. I wasn't alone, others I know had the same issues. They were an unmitigated disaster, it beats me how they ever made it to market. (All were replaced under warranty with other brands.) BTW, I never lost any data as I used Tandberg QIC tape streamers for backups.
Incidentally, the drive killed by the manual was only 20MB. If I recall correctly the largest Connor drive I used was only 40MB.
Did you ever attempt to recover the data from that drive by way of a data recovery service or such?
blincoln|11 months ago
supermatou|11 months ago
Also: the drive was absolutely dead, it wouldn't power up. I even tried to change its controller - I took it off another Conner drive, installed it on the deceased one - and nothing happened. On that occasion I realized that, even though they were the same model/capacity, Conner had used different electronics for different batches.
Ironically, the drive was built like a tank: never again I saw a hard-drive with a casing that thick (looked like cast iron).