Hard Drives coming back from the dead...

Soul Rider

Soul Rider

Soul Rider

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Joined
29 Nov 2005
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433
Location
Milton Keynes
I am a hoarder, i never throw anything away unless i really have to. I am currently moving house, so i thought what better time to go through all my old pieces of hardware and throw away everything that doesn't work.

I thought i'd start with my pile of broken hard drives. They had all died on me and been completely unsalvagable.

I started with my Maxtor 120GB drive. This has been packed away for 6 months. It always had powered up and the disk spun but It became totally unwritable. It would fail scan disk, chkdsk and i wasn't even able to format it.

I powered it up, SMART reported ok, and low and behold, the disk worked. I formatted it in windows, copied data to and from it, and then carried out hard drive benchmarking in sisoft, all ok.

Next up was my WD 20Gb drive. Not only did this power up, but it still had all my data on it. To say i was shocked was an under statement.

I have tried with 3 other known faulty drives and they are now all working. Is this normal? Does anyone else have experience of this or am i some sort of freak?
 
I have had a WD RAID pair which wouldn't work. Tried running test disks over them. All kinds of utilities. Then eventually gave up on them as dead.

Next day they had cooled down completely, and worked long enough for me to recover all of the data. So I can see why some drives seem dead one day, then magically return the next day..... but never heard of them needing to go to sleep for six months. :)
 
Well they didn't neccesarily need to sleep for six months, it was just six months before i got round to testing them again, and they all worked fine. I now know if a drive dies on me, i'm not going to throw it away.
 
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