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That hard drive probably had "sticktion", where the read/write head sticks to the platter surface, preventing the motor from spinning the drive up. It can happe

That hard drive probably had "sticktion", where the read/write head sticks to the platter surface, preventing the motor from spinning the drive up. It can happen if you leave a hard drive running for a while and then shut it down without allowing it to park its head. Modern hard drives are clever enough to park the head when they detect the power supply turning off, so it hasn't been such a problem recently. The recommended solution for sticktion is to lift the comptuter (or hard drive, if it is separate) about an inch off the desk, and let go.

scarygliders 12y ago
When I was a Customer Support Engineer for SGI way back, I had to swap out a load of IBM drives on lots of SGI kit at various customer locations due to this, which was dubbed "The IBM Stiction Problem". Power off --> remove drive --> Sharply tap the drive on desk --> replace drive + add new drive --> clone The look on customer faces at the "Sharply tap the drive on desk" stage was as priceless as the data on the hard drive B)
- mnw21cam 12y ago
  A while back, my workplace had a medium-sized disc array. That is, something like a hundred UW-SCSI 72GB drives, arranged into about twelve different RAID-5 sets. When we had to power it down because of scheduled electrical work in the building, about eight of the drives failed to come up again. It's a miracle none of the RAID-5 sets were broken. Hard drives don't like being switched off if they have been going for a couple of years. And that is why RAID is no substitute for backups, people. A reasonable proportion of events that will take out a hard drive will take out more than one.
vidarh 12y ago
Maybe. What I maybe didn't make clear, though, was that this wasn't a one off thing: I had to manually spin it up every time I turned it on. After the first couple of times I didn't bother screwing the cover back on, and occasionally I'd leave it off to show friends...
- vidarh 12y ago
  I know someone who got his drive working again after the drive heads had fused to the plate by slowly heating the drive in an oven while it was connected. They then proceeded to copy data off as quickly as possible. Poor mans version of what some recovery services does if the above advice of dropping/tapping on it doesn't work...

scarygliders 12y ago

When I was a Customer Support Engineer for SGI way back, I had to swap out a load of IBM drives on lots of SGI kit at various customer locations due to this, which was dubbed "The IBM Stiction Problem". Power off --> remove drive --> Sharply tap the drive on desk --> replace drive + add new drive --> clone The look on customer faces at the "Sharply tap the drive on desk" stage was as priceless as the data on the hard drive B)

mnw21cam 12y ago
A while back, my workplace had a medium-sized disc array. That is, something like a hundred UW-SCSI 72GB drives, arranged into about twelve different RAID-5 sets. When we had to power it down because of scheduled electrical work in the building, about eight of the drives failed to come up again. It's a miracle none of the RAID-5 sets were broken. Hard drives don't like being switched off if they have been going for a couple of years. And that is why RAID is no substitute for backups, people. A reasonable proportion of events that will take out a hard drive will take out more than one.

vidarh 12y ago

Maybe. What I maybe didn't make clear, though, was that this wasn't a one off thing: I had to manually spin it up every time I turned it on. After the first couple of times I didn't bother screwing the cover back on, and occasionally I'd leave it off to show friends...

vidarh 12y ago
I know someone who got his drive working again after the drive heads had fused to the plate by slowly heating the drive in an oven while it was connected. They then proceeded to copy data off as quickly as possible. Poor mans version of what some recovery services does if the above advice of dropping/tapping on it doesn't work...