AWA Troubleshooting
b. The drive is replaceable with any standard 3.5” disk drive. These items are available
at numerous retail outlets such as: Best Buy, Circuit City or nearly all computer sales
outlets, as well as on the Internet. They are usually less than $20 items.
c. Ribbon cable/power cable knocked loose: The rear of the disk drive contains a 4 pin
DC power connector, and a ribbon cable connector. One or both of these connectors
may have been knocked off its mounting pins. While most AWA tester have these
items glued in place for security, rough handling can knock them off.
7. Hard Disk Drive Failure
a. The AWA has used commercially available hard disk drives since inception. Over the
years the drive capacity has increased form 80 MB to 30 GB (at the time of this
writing) AWA testers manufactured since 2000 have included vibration dampers on
the hard disk. These dampers can be retrofitted to ANY AWA manufactured since
1996.
b. The drive is replaceable with any IDE compatible hard drive, with the following
caveats: The motherboards of units manufactured before (approximately) serial # 160
may not accept hard disks larger than 8.4GB. If possible, locate and use a smaller
storage capacity drive.
c. If the AWA crashes/locks up/shut down unexpectedly, you should manually run the
CHKDSK utility, with the /f /r switches as explained in step 4c. This may help
scan/clear errors before they cause total system failure.
d. The computer port of the AWA testers is a single channel IDE port. It will control
two IDE devices properly. If the hard drive is failed, the entire ribbon cable assembly
should be replaced at that time as well. New drives come with new cables. Use them.
