Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
with. The second set is important. Sometimes the BIOS doesn't auto correctly. Listen to the
HD. If it powers up normally by sound (no strong thumping sound) and the platters seem to
spin up, you still have a chance. If the drive spins up and then down or if it emits a strong
thumping sound, the hard drive is toast and only a professional recovery company with a clean
room can help. If the HD doesn't spin up at all, occasionally you can gently slam it down to get
stuck platters unstuck and it will spin up long enough to back up your data. The HD is toast
physically at this point, and it needs to be replaced before trying the slam technique. There
were also a few older HDs that had the flywheel exposed, and you could nudge it slightly and
they would spin up long enough to back up the data. Again these are last resort techniques
and you ARE planning on replacing the HD anyway. From here, one of several software
products are available to assist you as long as the drive spins up physically to assist the
technician. Most of these products can read drives with damaged FAT tables or missing sectors.
And it could be just a simple matter of losing the Active attribute for the partition! Also, viruses
can cause this by blasting the partition table, and some of the professional revival products can
assist from here.
Good luck!
From: Christopher Tolmie
• If the drive is not spinning up on power-on, I'll lightly rap on the side of the drive enclosure
with the handle of a screwdriver while listening for the platters to begin to spool-up.
• If it doesn't spin up, I'll increase the pressure of each rap until it does start spinning. I've
gone to the extreme of picking up an externally mounted full height 5.25" disk drive and
slamming it continuously on the desk while it was starting up.
• I did this for over six months until the drive finally died completely, but I did extend its life
and it never had corrupt data on it. Of course, it was all backed up. If the drive won't spin,
then you aren't going to recover the data.
• You can you a third-party utility like RESCUE that reads the drive directly using its own
operating system and saving individual files and directories to another drive. I've recovered
entire drives this way it is time consuming but it works. When all else fails, send it to the
professionals.
.
From: Craig Shipaila
Before you do the following, make sure that the controller is not the problem or a cable on
backwards, etc., by taking the drive out of the computer and putting into another one to see if
it's the computer causing the problem. If the other items have been checked, then do (what
we call) the slam test.
If the drive is dead the only thing you can really do is:
1. Find out if the person needs any important info that you might be able to get off of
computer.
1a. If person has data they cannot live without and the drive is not running, take the drive out
of the computer and slam it down to the desktop to get the motor running. Nine out of 10
times, this will get the motor running long enough to get data. If needed you can also send the
drive into a White Room to have them get the info.
