Is It Possible To Jump Start A Hard Drive?

[Thomas Dequinas]

A few days ago my hard drive appeared to be working perfectly fine. I shut my computer down and the next morning when I turned it back on, instead of the one brief beep noise that tells you everything's fine, I get this different beeps that seem to be around 9, maybe 10 or more beeps (sounds kinda like music). I unplug the hard drive and the error's gone. I then try to use the cable connected to my DVD-ROM drive and still the same thing. I guess it's gotta be the drive. I even plugged in my spare 30 gig and installed Windows on that afterwards.

Well my computer will no longer detect this hard drive and I'm not sure if I'm screwed now or what. Is there actually a way to like jump start the drive or maybe find out if something's wrong with it inside and fix that? I don't plan to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to get it repaired either. This drive is a 120 gigger and made by Maxtor, it's pretty old too.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Questions:

1. Does the hard drive spin up when power is applied? If not then some hard drives suffer from what is known as stickshion, and as a last resort tapping the drive on the side sometimes gets the main motor spinning again. Power the drive on and tap it in the direction of the green arrow in the diagram below.

NEVER tap it from the top as this will cause the heads to hit the surface and cause damage to the heads and disk surface.

2. If the hard drive spins up, do you hear any repeated clicks or sort of scraping noises? If so you probably have a head crash or a tracking error. The drives firmware has to pass it's own internal tests before it will be detected by the PCs BIOS. In the case of a mechanical failure like this then I'm afraid you're out of luck.

There is one other thing you could do. Try connecting the faulty drive as a slave on the same cable as your working drive. You will have to alter jumpers on the drives as follows:
1. Set the working drive to Master (Some drives you need to set it to Master with Slave Present)
2. Set the faulty drive to Slave.
There's a reason why they use the terminology Master and Slave, it's because the Master drive in effect becomes the master controller of the two drives, and sometimes this overcomes certain drive electronic errors with the slave drive.

Good luck.
Clare.

 

[Thomas Dequinas]

Thanks for the solutions. I haven't tried connecting the other drive as a slave yet but have considered it. I will also have to try tapping the drive if I'm certain that it doesn't spin up. I'm sure I did hear spinning when I turned on my PC but no scraping noises, just the beep error code. I'll make sure whether or not it does spin or not when I try to fix this tomorrow morning.