Hard drive mechanical crash

[mabr]

Shack , you have PM.

[upnorth]

I am sorry guys but you are not convincing me. Please provide documentation of this. I have well over 20 IDE and SATA that are non-detectable drives which have been tested on Phoenix, Asus, Intel and other various BIOS plateforms and there has never been a message like this. It just does not show up? Period!

[Shack]

Same here! All I am asking for is a simple logical explanation on how you and PI "know" this messages meaning is indeed the opposite of what it says?

Are you going to offer up an explanation?

My pointless point has been proven already by the other machines displaying the drive in BIOS.

[upnorth]

15 years full time professional IT hardware experience?

The bios checks the different controllers for drives at time of boot, can't find it, it won't list it. If it won't list it you can't even run tests on it. Mabr tried long enough that the drive finally spun up enough for the bios to see it, but still it wouldn't boot. He could boot it again and it and it may not find it. The drive is toast. Now someone with the right equipment may be able to pull the platter/s out and mount them in another drive and they may be able to pull data, but we have sent a drive off like that and spent $1500 and got nothing.

If you boot a couple times and it won't find it, unplugg and replug, if that doesn't do it, a different cable or if there is a second SATA/EIDE/IDE controller you grasp for some straws and try that. But rarely and I mean rarely seen that work. And then you have to tweak the bios to get it to boot from that controller and I have not tried that with SATA.

The real tell tale is the tic tic tic and then stop at boot. That tells me the drive won't spin up, won't spin up and you can't read the disk. Until you can make it spin you will get no where. A few people have already suggested tapping it a little and not sure if he did or not. But once you start tapping the drive you risk destroying the reading head. Freezing is a new one to me, but I can see it working...for a short period of time.

[delcecchi]

I can see the freezing or tapping perhaps helping. One cause of failure is "stiction" although I haven't heard much about it lately. Basically the head sticks to the disk while powered down due to the very close tolerances, and sometimes the lubricant. When powered down the head contacts the disk. If it gets stuck, the motor doesn't have enough torque to tear it loose.

Physical or thermal cycling could be enough to break it loose.

Or maybe not.

[upnorth]

I also envision a possible bearing failure.

[mabr]

Hallelujah, the freezer trick is working!!!!! Just did it, figure what the heck either spend $$$ or just not worry about trashing whats on it and start from scratch with a new HD. 20 min in the freezer and it started right up. Doing the back up as I type at 60% hopefully all is readable. thanks for the help folks.

[upnorth]

Good to hear!!!

[mabr]

Looks like i got it all. Everything so far is readable. Now just have to get all my software installed and should be good to go.