This is what one guy told me, when he gave away a "broken" floor sweeper. Its Kawasaki gasoline engine would not start.
We dumped all old gas, put in new gas, it still would not start. More investigation showed no spark.
The machine has a safety switch that prevents ignition, unless both doors are closed. It turned out that the switch was missing a little dowel pin and would not engage, so the safety switch would prevent ignition.
I made a pin from a piece of tig filler rod and now this sweeper works great. If it was a propane pased sweeper, I could consider keeping it.
I am not trying to engage in self aggrandizement, because a) it was a simple problem and b) I am guilty of being just as dumb in other cases.
I got a free pressure washer from someone who said it wouldn't start. I got it home, pulled the carb, ran it through the ultrasonic cleaner, blew it dry with air, reassembled and it's run fine ever since.
There you go... I think that most "would not start" problems are a lot easier to fix than "runs poorly" problems. Applies to gas, diesel, and electric devices.
Hows about I mail you this 2 Terabyte USB hard drive that's failing after maybe 24 hours of On time in the last year so you can plug it in and make it all better?
Good score! Rates up there with the single phase compressor I collected off someonese verge pile. Pushed the reset button on the motor and its run well ever since.
My son,"the Kid", makes a nice side income cruising craig's list and local online auctions for snowmobiles and four wheelers that "don't run". He has most running nicely in one evening. He does get taken every now and then with a blown engine.
Then its off to eBay for parts sales. That worked well till last week when he sold a hi performance exhaust system and an eBay buyer stiffed him for purchase plus shipping.
Take it out of the box so it doesn't bake inside of the enclosure and is free from whatever USB interface they stuffed in there, and use it as an internal drive.
Don't know about that, I've been using the same .5T (500Gb) drive for the last four years. I missed out on buying a new 1Tb drive last year when they were ~$80, and $150 is past my budget right now.
The portable ones like Jim has, however, are contained in little boxes where they get hot, jostled around, and are connected with dodgy USB interfaces. The actual drives inside of them are regular drives however, sometimes premium ones (WD caviar blacks show up in some of them), and taking them out of the "portable" enclosure and connecting them as an internal drive is a viable option if you can find one on sale/clearance and are just looking for a cheap drive (you don't get to be picky about what's inside, though).
With the prices the way they are now, though, there really aren't many deals to be had, unfortunately, but if you have a portable that is misbehaving (and the warranty is up), you don't have much to lose by cracking it open and trying.
This one is a year-old 2T WD Elements that I used to back up other drives. I had nearly filled it and was sorting the large low-value files like recorded music awards shows onto another big drive when it started to show errors. IOW it had been written ONE time.
S.M.A.R.T fails for high reallocated sector count. HDTune showed about two dozen bad blocks, roughly in two stripes. Check Disk found and attempted to fix numerous sector problems. HDTune is running again and so far shows nearly the same pattern of bad blocks on the first half. These tests take 1 to 2 days to complete on such a large drive.
formatting link
I have it in the cool basement running on a laptop to reduce the cost of testing. The KAWez shows $0.15 worth of electricity per day. The drive isn't reporting its temperature but the case is barely warm. Google's drive reliability study showed no correlation between temperature and failure rate, and not much predictive value for S.M.A.R.T.
FWIW, the bad reviews of large Seagate drives complain about Mac incompatibility, for WD they report early failures. I'm working on a burn-in test program that will fill a new drive with pattern data and read it back, since I haven't found a free one. Unless someone gives me a better plan the patterns will be 0, 1, 5, A like a memory test. The test will write the files sequentially to minimize seeking and complete sooner. Hopefully it will catch a problem during the store's return period.
I repartitioned a second-hand laptop drive around an area of numerous and increasing failures and have had no further problems with it.
So run the WD diagnostic tools on it, copy the fail code that produces and put in for an RMA online. WDs typically have a 3-5 year warranty, you can check it by model and serial on the web site. I usually send in at least a couple of drives to whatever OEM every year and get replacements. No need to get bent out of shape about it, they die, regularly. The trick is to be able to continue processing after they DO die, plan for it, it's inevitable.
Lately, I've been using Hitachis, have a stack of those running and have had only one warranty claim in a couple of years. WDs were MUCH worse. Will be disappointed when Hitachi's disk division sale gets finalized, have been decent-running drives, very cool, very quiet. For backups, I do full bit-by-bit mirror copies onto bare-nekkid SATA internal drives using a toaster-looking gadget, the drive just drops in one of the slots. No fancy case needed. Has USB and eSATA, works well with either. So when a drive dies, it gets replaced with the copy and life continues on. A couple of minutes to slip it into the bay plus a reboot. Have a stack of drives I got cheap at Microcenter as returns, usually somebody got the wrong interface. Cheaper than tapes of the same capacity and a lot faster, too.
One physical backup copy is NOT enough. Acronis is the backup of choice at the moment, back-rev OEM-specific versions can be had at both Seagate and WD for free, those only work with at least one of their own drives hooked up, though. Can be USB, too.
One year limited warranty. Bought on Thanksgiving 2010, "expired 10/29/2011" For being a loyal customer they have a special deal for me, another 2T for $162.
I have and use Seagate DiskWizard and Seatools, WD TrueImage and DataLifeGuard, Samsung ES-Tool, HDTune and Dell Diagnostics.
The WD drive started to fail while I was copying it to a new drive which is the fourth copy of some files. The Seagate GoFlex replacement is running Bart's Stuff Test 5 to exercise it while still within the store's 2-week return period.
formatting link
Just went downstairs to check on bst5 progress. The laptop BSOD'd after writing 1.3TB in one temp file. It rebooted fine and chkdsk says the new drive is OK. Does NTFS have a file size limit in the root like FAT?
Maybe the simple answer is to fill the whole drive with multiple copies of recorded TV show folders, which are >100GB, and then test it with HDTune.
I don't understand. That's a 1 year warranty and only eleven months have passed. That was still under warranty. What's the problem, unless you failed to notify them of the FUBAR within the warranty? WDs aren't what they used to be. Are IBMs (rebranded Fujitsus) any good nowadays? A friend who consulted with large companies used to swear by them, as did my old BBS and networking buddies.
-- Never trouble another for what you can do for yourself. -- Thomas Jefferson
The WD 1 year limited warranty begins at date of manufacture unless you send them a photocopy of the purchase receipt. The drive failed 14 months after purchase, 15 after manufacture.
I've had several small deals go bad on Ebay lately, but every one refunded my money. Several different problems: An AVR programmer that had a nasty Trojan in the installer software. (Per my practice I scanned the software before installing.) Another shipped the wrong parts. I bought a DVD of old electronics manuals that arrived with nothing but one empty folder. The last one surprised me. I was about to contact the seller to find out where my two low profile USB 2.0 cards were when they e-mailed me that the entire batch of boards was defective, and refunded my money without asking. I've had a few other problems, out of several hundred purchases, but all were resolved. Most with a single email.
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