Ever fixed a faulty drive?

Ekim

Ekim

Ekim

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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I have a couple of hard drives here that I have had kicking around for what must be close to 7 or so years.

They are the exact same make and model (WD1600JB-00EVA0) can't really remember what happened but I seem to recall they make a clicking noise when plugged in and don't do much apart from that.

If I wiggle the drive I can hear, what sounds like the plates inside moving around - not sure if this would happen with a normal drive though.

I have long since considered the data lost, always been tempted to send it to a professional lab thing but just can't justify the cost - especially given one just has an OS install on it and the other has all the stuff I want and I don't know which.

I am half considering opening them up and seeing if I can transplant the platters to another drive or something. I doubt it'd work but wanted to see if anyone had any success.
 
Ekim said:
I am half considering opening them up and seeing if I can transplant the platters to another drive or something. I doubt it'd work but wanted to see if anyone had any success.
Click to expand...

This will result in failure, a 100% surety, no leeway barring divine intervention.
 
+1
they are a sealed unit,exposing them to the air will destroy them,even if they are broken youll have no hope in getting them to work
 
I had a hard drive that kept clicking and I couldn't get it to show in Windows to copy just 1 file from it.

In anger, I kicked it really hard into a desk. Upon plugging it back in, it worked flawlessly.

I'd previously tried it in about 5 machines, with different SATA cables each time, to no avail.

The only time brute force has worked for me in IT :D

The drive still works, this incident took place 3 years ago
 
Head was probably stuck, back in the day (we're talking 500mb-1gb etc..) WD drives suffered from it quite often i found, tapping it a few times sometimes helped, some worked for yrs after. Wonder if you threw a deathstar with glass platter if you'd be that lucky? :p
 
Heh, it is a Maxtor drive, 80GB I think. It wasn't the end of the world if I couldn't get the file back, but it saved me a day of redoing something. Brute force FTW
 
bledd. said:
I had a hard drive that kept clicking and I couldn't get it to show in Windows to copy just 1 file from it.

In anger, I kicked it really hard into a desk. Upon plugging it back in, it worked flawlessly.

I'd previously tried it in about 5 machines, with different SATA cables each time, to no avail.

The only time brute force has worked for me in IT :D

The drive still works, this incident took place 3 years ago
Click to expand...

Reminds me of years back when we used Sun SparcStation1 "pizza boxes" ... their drives were notorious for getting heads stuck after being parked/powered down and I seem to recall Sun "recommended fix" for this was to administer a sharp blow to the side of the box to unstick the head - certainly had to do this on a number of occasions!
 
stick it in a polythene bag in the freezer for an hour or two when done connect it to an external drive caddy or similar and use r-studio software or similar to recover what you can of the drive have done it on a couple old ones before and recovered 99% of my files of drives that were clicking like a playin card in the spokes of a bike
 
I have replaced PCB's on HDD's before to make a drive useable again, and use nail's to replace broken molex pins lol. (I did it properly so it was safe, as it was a permanent fix).

If you intend to retrieve the data then replacing the PCB might lose the critical rom chip for that drive.
 
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