Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: Randy Forston
If the hard drive isn't making noise and when you place your hand on it (not on the PC Board side, but on the metal casing), you don't feel any vibration from the drive, you may have a sticking problem (some older drives with a variety of drive lube no longer used have this problem).
If the above describes the symptoms you're seeing, try rapping around the drive case with the plastic handle of a screwdriver.
This will quite often remedy the stiction and allow the drive to come back up as normal.
Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: philn
Hi there, A few things can be performed on a crashed drive before declaring it DEAD:
- Touch the drive (or listen to it) to feel whether it's spinning. Some drives gradually suffer from spin-up problem but otherwise work fine once spinning. If it doesn't spin at power up, gently knock on the side the drive once or twice to jump start it. This works best if you knock on the drive approx. one or two seconds after power is applied. Repeat the procedure a few times and add a little more force if necessary. Remember that too much force can permanently damage the drive, but again, you have nothing too lose at this point.
- If drive spins normally and stays spinning, try listening for irregular sounds emitting from the drive. A series of 'clicking' sound usually signifies multiple bad sectors including the boot sector that can prevent drive from booting. If drive 'Auto Detect' is enabled, make sure that its signature is shown at boot screen. If not, drive is certainly suffered from major hardware failure.
- Check system's CPU to make sure it's not overheating (CPU can run warm, but should not be hot) due to a failed cooling fan, etc. Overheating the CPU can cause the system to be unbootable or cause the system to reboot itself frequently.
- You could use another system to test the problematic drive to make sure that the controller is not at fault. Try both "Auto" and "User Type" (where you manually enter the drive's parameters) settings.
- Try booting with a floppy and run 'fdisk' to view drive information. Some drives suddenly lost all of their data possibly due to corrupted FAT, but otherwise, continue to work fine once initialized and formatted. In many cases, FAT can be restored by executing Norton Utilities from floppy.
If all failed and data from drive must be retrieved, you can try swapping its hardware (drive's main board) with similar working drive. Though this procedure can void drive warranty, but your data is more important, right? Or else, you try services that can save your data from dead drive for a fee.
