Hard Drive is pining for the Fjords

[lumberjim]

It's havin a Kip.

It is has ceased to be. this is an EX hard drive

so i want my goddamned data back

It goes click click click.... but it's not detected by the bios...or whatever

I took it out, and hit it with a stapler... nuthin.

hooked it up to a SATA/USB adapter, not found.

Took off the cover...disc spins up, but the arm goes back and forth 3 times (click click click) and rests, repeats.

Tried replacing the board from another drive, same symptom.

Looked at sending it out to have the data recovered, but they start over $1000 even at Geek Squad

any ideas?

[Carruthers]

I know that this is going to be something of a long shot, but I have recovered data from an external hard drive as follows:

1. Start > Run > type in cmd then click OK to get a command prompt.

2. Type in chkdsk e: /r (replace e: with the drive letter of your external hard drive).

I think that this might fall into the 'last ditch' category but you never know...

[Gravdigr]

Let's begin this way: I'm a computer ijit, but, is it possible to swap platters (the actual discs) from one drive to another? It's been a while since I looked at a naked hard drive.

[xoxoxoBruce]

If they wanted you to have the information on that disc, they wouldn't have sabotaged the drive.
Remember, there are consequences for second guessing them.

burn this post after you read it

[lumberjim]

I don't think that is wise. I probably should not have opened it to see inside in a non sterile environment. i didnt touch it. just looked to see what it was doing. i thought that the arm was getting stuck on something..... it may be, but i cant see any obstruction. it may be under the disc.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by lumberjim

I don't think that is wise. I probably should not have opened it to see inside in a non sterile environment. i didnt touch it. just looked to see what it was doing. i thought that the arm was getting stuck on something..... it may be, but i cant see any obstruction. it may be under the disc.

Correct.

It's actually quite amazing how close to the surface of the disks the heads fly without touching. To put it into perspective, a modern hard disk has a floating height of an amazing 0.5 microinches. A human hair has a thickness of over 2,000 microinches! You can see why keeping dirt out of the hard disk is so important! In fact, the floating height of a hard disk is smaller than the circuit size of a microprocessor. What's even more amazing is how much abuse these hard disks can take when they are placed in laptop PCs, for example, given these facts, and how many people take this technology for granted every day...

The clicking you heard was probably the heads seeking the start position, failing, retrying, repeat, repeat, etc.

[lumberjim]

Yeah, the new drive in my pc is a 480Gb solid state drive