Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
From: Earle Pearce
When a drive is really gone—cannot be read at all—due to a physical failure, I employ a trick
that has yet to fail me.
1. Install the replacement as an additional drive.
2. Remove the bad drive and smite it firmly on both edges (bang it on something solid)!
3. Reinstall it, reboot, and it will work long enough to get the data copied to the replacement
drive.
4. I haven't had the opportunity to check this step yet but I think it should work. If it's the
boot drive that's bad, mirror the boot partition to the replacement drive, then break the mirror,
remove the bad drive rejumper, and boot to the new one.
The rest of the solutions
From: Scott Wittell, MCP A+
I had to laugh when I saw this easy fix, and it does work. We were able to bring back a failed
drive in an older HP server running NetWare 4.11. First step is to remove the drive from the
machine. Second, hold the drive flat in your palms. Third, shake the drive a few times in an
up-and-down motion, like you're trying to hammer a nail. Don't let the drive hit the floor
though. I've used this technique on numerous occasions, works every time.
The Hair Dryer Method
For the last resort (when the drive really did die, it-is-not -even-spinning type crashes), there
is a possible solution that comes from the early days of hard drives. Back then you were not
supposed to turn them off—I don't know why but IBM said never turn them off unless you are
standing there. One of our main computers was housed in a closet where I could not hear it
well and had a power supply failure that apparently took days to complete. I happened to open
the closet for some other reason and discove red a warm box and immediately went through
the shut down sequence to take it off line for a new power source. Several days later, the unit
was shut down again for a long weekend of downtime on a routine maintenance schedule and
upon restarting the system the hard drive would not work. I am pretty good at
backing up everything but could not find the backup disk anywhere. Panic. I am the author of a
newsletter that goes to hundreds of subscribers everyday, and the mailing list was on the dead
drive. I replaced the drive and reloaded everything but was going through sobbing spells as I
looked for solutions to recover the lost data. Data recovery companies wanted over five
thousand dollars to try to recover the data. A client of mine told me he once possessed an old
286 that required a hair dryer to get it running every time he turned it on. The fellow who had
built it for him was an IBM technician and gave him the hair dryer idea because that is what
IBM used to do to restart the drives in down machines. So on the bench machine with the drive
out where the dryer could get to it and still be hooked up, I began the process. Lo and behold,
it worked. While it was running, I downloaded all the missing data and immediately uploaded it
to the new drive. Don't laugh, I got my outcome and can now say I recovered a fully dead hard
drive with my wife's hair dryer.
From: John B.
As for me, I have had good success with this method (about 50-50). I take the drive, and
suspend it 4" over a plastic carpet tool (one of those things you see in an office to help the
 
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