In response to last week's WFTD "Head Crash" inSync reader Jim B. provides us with a pretty good Tech Tip.

Head crashes are very nasty all by themselves. However, head crashes on removable media are extremely bad, because people tend to mistake a head crash for an I/O error. Then they either:

A) mount a different, good disk in the crashed drive, permanently destroying that disk too.

B) mount the crashed disk in a different good drive, permanently destroying that drive too.

Doing this over and over magnifies the problem, big time. I've seen major computer centers take down hundreds of drives and data disks this way -- admittedly about twenty years ago.

So why should you care? Because Syquest, Iomega, and other mountable drives work exactly the same way and have exactly the same exposures. Head crashes are usually obvious in the amount of noise, smoke, smell, etc. they generate. However, it's not a bad idea to (carefully) visually inspect any suspected drive and disk, especially if the symptom is that the disk cannot be read AT ALL (or, large portions cannot be read, as some devices have multiple read/write heads, any one of which could independently crash).

When in doubt, don't put any valuable media in the suspect drive, and find somebody who knows what they're doing to check it all out.