Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
• Turn the power off again, and this time, about a second after you turn the power back on
again, move the drive in a quick, forceful, circular motion.
• The object here is to impart some force to the spindle platter, as a sort of mechanical ”jump-
start,” so that the force of your manual motion, added to the drive motor's normal start-up
torque, will be sufficient to overcome the extra dragging stiction of the gummy lubricants,
allowing the spindle to start up. If this fails the first time, try again.
• Use both clockwise, and counter-clockwise attempts, since you probably have no way of
knowing what the actual direction of spin is.
• You'll know immediately when you succeed by the feel of the vibration of the spindle motor
starting, and the sound.
• Now, back up that irreplaceable data, make that new drive sale, and restore. Smile modestly
when acknowledging your wizardry.
From: Arve Alsvik
The procedure I suggest is absolutely a last resort thing to do.
I've would have tried to replace the hard drives controller-card. The card sitting on top of the
disk. Usually it can be removed. And most likely malfunctioning controller card is the reason for
the hard drive crash. But it have to be replaced with another card from the same type of hard
disk. In a corporate environment this would be easy, but alas, it may be more difficult in a
home situation. Anyway: This is my only suggestion.
From: John_A_Cook
• The first thing I would do is pull in a BIOS upgrade from the PC manufacturer and flash the
system.
• You said that the user got into the Setup and changed the settings. If an upgrade for the
BIOS does not find the drive and auto detect the it, then get out the tools and open the
machine up to have a look at it's guts.
• Remove the HDD and get the info off of it and manually enter it into the settings.
From: TorA.Rysstad
The most important thing to do in this situation is to protect the data on the drive. And in my
experience; the more one try to "look" for data on the disk, the more it might get destroyed.
Try to listen to the hard drive. Are there any weird sounds emitting from it? I have two "sound
categories.” The first is identified by sort of "buzzing" sound or perhaps a loud "ploink" sound.
The second category: no sound at all, or the drive seems to running at full speed, even if the
PC is "frozen.” The first might indicate a physical damage. That might be hard to solve, but
that does not imply that everything is lost. I often find almost everything on the disk like this:
• Take the damaged hard drive out of the client's PC.
• Take particular care not to bump the drive. There is a chance that the heads are not parked
properly. You don't need more damage to the disk than there already are!
• Put the damaged disk in another PC.
Usually with modern disks you can auto-sense the needed specs (Heads, Cylinders, etc.), but
sometimes you'll need to type this manually. And of some reason the hard drive manufactures
has not considered it important enough to print this information on the label. This has puzzled
me more than one time... But you can find all you need on the Internet.