Last Friday I found my northbridge and video card fans dead. Replace fans only to have ended up screwing into the northbridge chip fuxoring my motherboard. Order new MB from newegg for $45 including shipping. It arrives today, so I put it in. Meanwhile I've had my harddrive in a spare PC. After the computer is all put back together I pull my HD out of the spare PC. It's HOT. I don;t think too much of it and put it back in my rebuilt PC. Boots windows loads all the drivers and what not, grabs an update and has to "reboot"
...
tick, tick, tick
windows cannot load blah blah blah need to run repair.
reboot
tick, tick, tick DEAD. I'm SOL, my last good backup was about a year ago. I did grab all of the baby pictures "just in case" this afternoon. I'm thinking RAID sounds really good right about now. Woe-is-me pitty party for me.

5/11/2006 10:41:25 PM

now my question is about HD diagnosis.
Bios doesn't recognize it.
Maxtor powermax doesn't recognize it.
OnTrack easy data recovery doesn't recognize it.
It does spin but when it searches it sounds like the head slams against the side of the drive. So does that sound like physical damage or electrical?

5/12/2006 12:32:54 AM

try putting it in the freezer first.

5/12/2006 1:33:57 AM

has anyone actually done that and got it to work?

5/12/2006 6:06:58 AM

[yes]

5/12/2006 9:41:06 AM

Is that the last resort attempt. Will be be completely unaccessible after you do the freezer trick if it doesn't work?

5/12/2006 12:09:17 PM

Be very careful not to get it wet or anything obviously. pastic bags are a nice idea. I suppose it's possible for the cold to cause the platters to crack, but they'd have to be very warped already.

5/12/2006 1:30:52 PM

^ No one has a freezer in their house cold enough to crack a HDD platter.

5/12/2006 1:53:18 PM

like I said, it would have to be REALLY warped, and effectively already damaged. I wasn't suggesting it was even remotely likely, just that I supposed it could be possible if the platters were really that warped anyways, in which case they'd already be beyond recovery anyways.

[Edited on May 12, 2006 at 1:58 PM. Reason : ]

5/12/2006 1:57:41 PM

would you not worry about condensation?

Okay, aparently this drive is crap (40GB maxtor D740X-6L) 6L040L2.

Someone on ebay is selling the boards for these for data recovery.

Since it spins fine AND the drive is NOT recognized by anything that tells me that the cicuitry is bad. But I also hear the click, click, click of the head. I don't ever work with this kind of thing. Is it worth $25 to replace the controller board? Or is the clicking mean my physical surface is gone.

[Edited on May 12, 2006 at 3:29 PM. Reason : ?]

5/12/2006 3:10:01 PM

Put in in a zip lock.

Put it in your freezer.

If you're worried about damaging it, build a time machine and go back before it was broken.

5/12/2006 3:25:57 PM