hard drive noise

[Jay Nugent]

Greetings,

On Fri, 13 May 2005, Rick Bowers wrote:

> My experience with Western Digital has been much different.  I find that 
> the drives fail to spin up after about a year of use.  Twice now, I have 
> put my backup files on a WD drive and can no longer access those files -- 
> lost forever. On power up, the drive just sits and "clicks" like it wants 
> to spin up but can't. (anyone know the "key" to getting a WD WD800B008-RNN 
> drive out of its' external USB case so I can replace the drive)?


   Sounds like "sticktion".  Where the heads tend to stick to the platter 
and the motor does not have enough starting torque to get the platter 
spinning again.  The solution that has worked for me several times, is to 
place the drive in the freezer.  Yup, get in thouroughly cold.

   Take it out of the freezer, reconnect it to the computer, and power it
up!  Nine times out of ten it will spin up just fine.  Let it warm up for
awhile just spinning (~10 minutes), then begin reading the data off the
drive.  If it is too cold when you begin the reads it *may* give some read
errors because things are dimensionally out of spec (cold DOES cause
metals to shrink and the heads may not perfectly line up over the data
tracks like they should).  Just keep trying, it'll get better as the drive 
warms up and comes back into alignment.

   I have recovered data files off VERY old Macs and CP/M machines this 
way.  


     --- Jay
             
"Those that sacrifice essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
 deserve neither liberty nor safety."  -- Ben Franklin (1759) 
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Jay Nugent   jjn at nuge.com    (734)484-5105    (734)544-4326/Fax        |
| Nugent Telecommunications  [www.nuge.com]     (734)649-0850/Cell       |
|   Internet Consulting/Linux SysAdmin/Engineering & Design/ISP Reseller |
| ISP Monitoring [www.ispmonitor.net] ISP & Modem Performance Monitoring |
| Web-Pegasus    [www.webpegasus.com] Web Hosting/DNS Hosting/Shell Accts|
| LinuxNIC, Inc. [www.linuxnic.net]   Registrar of the .linux TLD        |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  1:01pm  up 57 days, 13:58,  5 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.05, 0.05