Long posts was: breastle screen for HLA Adventure 877

It may not. This was a problem that only occured on power up. If the drive starts making funny noises and misbehaves after you're up and running, then it's something else.

At power up. Instead of the rapid flashing one normally sees with drive access, this was a slow steady flashing.

When this happened, the bios would report there was no bootable disk.

At the beginning, but with no bootable disk, you never got past the beginning.

It is relatively slow and bright compared to normal drive activity. The pattern is easily discerned: 3 short, 3 long, 3 short, repeat.

Definitely. Different computer case styles had drives mounted in different orientations. With 5 1-4" drives, the case slots permitted the 5 1-4" dimension to be either vertical or horizontal. With a horizontal slot, it was possible to mount the drive upside down, top being the metal case enclosing the platters and bottom being the circuit card.

On that type of drive, the read-write heads do not retract off the disk surface. Instead, they move to a landing zone and slowly lower onto the disk surface as the spindle slows. Some type of coating on the disk surface helps prevent the heads from gouging the surface. I think it was that coating that sometimes caused heads to stick on the next restart.

Sounds like a different problem. I only mentioned this because there are actually some problems that can be fixed by whacking the machine. But you should never whack the machine at an inappropriate moment (such as when the drive is actually running) because that can cause damage.