The drive didn't mount. It spinned up, but nothing happened. The BIOS didn't show anything and the noise, that horrible rattling noise of a thousand-cockroach horde running viciously through a tin tube, kept roaring. "Something is very wrong here," he thought after trying every trick in the book. It was then when he decided to open the drive on the bench at his Spring/Nextel's tech support office. Voiding the warranty of the new Fujitsu MHV2040AH drive, he was shocked when he found this mess:

"Shattered? How the heck can a hard drive plate be shattered in this way? This is not possible."

The drive was new and there were no visible marks outside. And as you can see in the images, the drive plate shattered on its own. Somehow. There are no signs of hammering or violence anywhere, except for the metal shards themselves. Chris swears that this is what happened and has no explanation about it, except that the 10,000rpm engine of the drive may have gone crazy at one point. I find that unlikely but who knows. Any expert in hard drives out there can tell us how this may happened?

While you think, here's some good music that matches the theme of this post (at least in its title). [Thanks Chris]

I was just reading about the development of the Disk II. Randy Wigginton and Woz worked on it for a few weeks, only finishing up the control software (which negated the need for fancy hardware controllers by using software to read and write the sectors in the right spot) hours before presenting it at CES in 1978. They stayed up all night after setting up the booth to get it done. When they finished, they tried to made a back up copy. And they accidentally overwrote the data disk with the blank. Less than a few hours before the show floor opened, they rewrote the entire control system.

[Flickr via Macrumors via Technobob, Apple2history.org]