hard drive noise

[Rick Bowers]

At 01:26 PM 5/13/2005, you wrote:
>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

Thanks, Jay!  I'll give that a try. (now where is that *older* WD drive 
that had the same problem?)

~Rick

>
>"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
>
>_______________________________________________
>Linux-users mailing list ( Linux-users at linux-sxs.org )
>Unsub/Password/Etc: 
>http://mail.linux-sxs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-users
>
>Need to chat further on this subject? Check out #linux-users on 
>irc.linux-sxs.org !