You’ll all keep in mind my grand experience in obtaining a photocopier. Well, it’s been a rollercoaster, I tell ya. While I still haven’t discovered a adjustment deserving sufficient to attempt, I have ended up being progressively frustrated. From time to time, I like to invite my buddies as well as household over for dinner, as well as conversation naturally turns to things like the art on the walls, the fish in the aquarium, or perhaps the photocopier in the living room. Now, I dearly like to share my enthusiasms with others, so it’s quite darned disappointing when I go to terminate off a few copies only to have the machine stop working to boot! It was time to deal with this issue when as well as for all.

When powered up, the photocopier would sit at a “Please Wait…” screen for a extremely long time, before ultimately coughing up an error code — SC990 — as well as an direction to phone call for service. A lot of other messages would flash up as well; Address book data Error, difficult Drive data Error, as well as so on. In the end I realized they all centered around data storage.

Pictured: the author, in his happy place, at peace with the copier.
Now, I’d already tried diving into the service menu when before, as well as chosen the choice to style the difficult drive. That had led to the issue disappearing for a short period, however now it was back. No amount of mashing away at the keypad would work this time. The style commands just returned “Failed” every time. পরবর্তী কি করতে হবে? You guessed it, it was time for a teardown!

Thankfully, photocopiers are designed for simple servicing — someone’s paying for all those service calls. A few screws as well as big panels were just popping off with ease; completely the opposite of working on cars. Spotting the difficult drive was easy, it appeared like some kind of laptop IDE unit. With only SATA laptops around the home to salvage parts from, I wasn’t able to find up with something to switch in.

A bit of research (and reading the label) taught me that the drive was a Toshiba MK2023GAS/HDD2187. Replacements were offered on eBay, however if I waited two weeks I’d most likely be wrist deep in some other abandoned equipment. It had to be sorted on the night. In the words of [AvE], if you can’t repair it… well, you understand exactly how it goes. I yanked the drive and, lo as well as behold – the copier booted directly up! just to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating, I churned out a few copies, as well as other than the continued jamming on all-black pages, whatever was fine. actually all it took to get the copier to boot was to eliminate the ailing drive. Suffice to say, I was type of dumbfounded.

The difficult drive a.k.a. the villain of the piece.
I’m happy to chalk up the win, however I have to draw problem with Ricoh’s style here. The copier is clearly capable of operating completely well without a difficult drive. It will provide up its document server as well as address book abilities, however it will still make copies as well as print without a problem.

Yet, when the copier’s drive fails, the system stops working totally as well as refuses to work. This necessitates a service phone call for the typical individual to get anything at all happening once again — triggering much lost work as well as productivity. A much better style in my eyes would have the copier notify individuals of the lost performance because of the failed drive as well as the requirement to phone call service, however let them copy! any type of IT administrator will understand the value of a bodged work around that keeps the business limping along for the day versus having a space of forty agitated workers with nothing to do. It’s a pity Ricoh selected to have the photocopier shut down totally rather than valiantly fight on.

Feel free to chime in with your own stories of minor failures that triggered overall shutdowns in the comments. video below the break.

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