Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
From: Mauri Presser
• Check the CMOS setup for drive settings.
• If an auto detect drive option is there, use it.
• Save the settings and reboot.
• Listen to see if the drive is spinning by putting your ear close to the drive (hopefully the drive
is not so loud that you do not need to get close to it to hear it).
• If it does not spin, shut down the computer.
• Check to make sure pin one of the cable is on pin one of the drive (you might have seen a
steady drive activity LED lit up if it was backwards).
• If one was on one, then physically remove the drive and FIRMLY holding on to it, twist your
wrist in an attempt to break the "sticktion" (bearings stuck) free.
• Hook the drive back up and power up to a boot floppy.
• If it spins up now, try FDISK or other third-party software to see if it recognizes the
partition(s).
• If not, try
R Studio
from R-TT
or equivalent to try and recover the partition.
• If it does see the partition (or if you recovered it) try and read the files.
• If not, back to Norton Disk Doctor.
• If this does not work, it's time a data recovery service (if the client will pay!). Good hunting!!
From: Karl DeGraff
The most successful methods I have used are:
1. Find a computer with the exact same operating system (Win 95, Win 98, etc.) that you can
use as a surrogate host. This works best if the secondary IDE channel is unused, allowing the
private use of that channel by the ailing drive, and usually eliminating the need of changing
jumpers.
2. Go to the drive's manufacturer's Web site (or use a drive parameters database) to get the
actual physical drive parameters.
3. Set the surrogate computer's BIOS parameters to expect the ailing drive and turn it off.
Auto is the best initial setting. Make sure the second IDE channel is enabled and power
management is off, at least for the hard drives.
4. Cable the ailing drive to the surrogate computer's secondary IDE channel using a reasonably
long IDE cable (see reason for long cable below).
5. If the drive does not spin during power up when it should (note that some SCSI drives have
delayed spin ups), take the drive, hold it in the fingertips of both hands (spider on a mirror
style), and rotate the drive's casing around the disk platters inside suddenly (the reason for
the long IDE cable). The most effective motion is to prepare by rotating slowly to a starting
position where your fingers are turned "up toward" your chest as far as is comfortable for you
wrists, then suddenly rotate "down out" from your chest as far as is comfortable, and then
immediately snap back to the original position. This technique works by moving the casing with
respect to the platters based on the principle of inertia and will often allow a drive with
"frozen" bearings to spin up one more time. Do not expect this technique to work twice!
6. If the drive does not spin up, see a drive/data recovery lab that has the ability to
disassemble the drive to get at the platters and recover the data from them by using
specialized clean room equipment. When performed by a qualifi ed lab, this process is quite
