Your hard drive is failing

It happens.. it always happens... right when you want it least your HD crashes, refusing to boot... Up until now you may have thought that its the end for your little HD... well not any longer... I've got some tried and tested methods that will get your drive spinning for 20-30 minute periods

It happens.. it always happens... right when you want it least your HD crashes, refusing to boot...

Up until now you may have thought that its the end for your little HD... well not any longer... I've got some tried and tested methods that will get your drive spinning for 20-30 minute periods so you can get all that stuff you really didnt want to lose...

There are 2 main methods...
- Cooling
- Physical abuse...

Try the methods in this order as banging the HD tends to leave the HD a little more worn out than before...

Cooling/Freezing

It is little known that when a HD refuses to spin on boot that it is likely that the bearings that help the platters inside the drive spin have got dust/stickyness inside their rails and so causes the platters to sit unevenly and so the heads rub against the platters causing noise (and accute discomfort to those of you that have witnessed the noise first-hand)

Freezing the HD in a waterproof bag will allow the metals inside the HD to shrink, in turn giving the HD's read/write heads clearance to work...

This method takes from 6-12 hours in a standard freezer and will give you about 30 minutes run time...
It can sometimes be repeated up to 6 or 7 times, but that really depends on how bad the problem really is...

Physical abuse

What can I say? This is the way I fix everything... but i never knew before that it can work for HDs...

As explained above, bearings cause millions of people excruciating heart-ache every year when they fuck up.

Holding the drive about 7" above a desk and dropping it on each of it's sides, rotating it can sometimes help to get a bit of life out of a dead drive, mainly because it can realign the bearings in the drive, and so it may work permanently, but it may not work at all, or maybe only once...

This method is non-scientific and should be used as a last case scenario, but it does work from time to time, and gave me 40 minutes of HD time...

nd so causes the platters to sit unevenly and so the heads rub against the platters causing noise (and accute discomfort to those of you that have witnessed the noise first-hand) Freezing the HD in a waterproof bag will allow the metals inside the HD to shrink, in turn giving the HD's read/write heads clearance to work... This method takes from 6-12 hours in a standard freezer and will give you about 30 minutes run time... It can sometimes be repeated up to 6 or 7 times, but that really depends on how bad the problem really is... [b]Physical abuse[/b] What can I say? This is the way I fix everything... but i never knew before that it can work for HDs... As explained above, bearings cause millions of people excruciating heart-ache every year when they fuck up. Holding the drive about 7" above a desk and dropping it on each of it's sides, rotating it can sometimes help to get a bit of life out of a dead drive, mainly because it can realign the bearings in the drive, and so it may work permanently, but it may not work at all, or maybe only once... This method is non-scientific and should be used as a last case scenario, but it does work from time to time, and gave me 40 minutes of HD time...

Written by Oli on Wednesday, 26 November 2003. Tagged with hardware. Read 2700 times. If you liked it, please give it a digg.

#1 /* 16 months, 15 days ago */

Just some info.

What you described with the bearing and heads touching etc is untrue. On most hard drives, the heads are designed to touch the platter when the drive is off. This is called CSS (or contact start-stop). On spin-up, the heads liftoff the platter and fly above it. IBM pioneered the ramp load-unload technology that physically lifts the heads off the platters during shutdown. Most laptop drives now use this. But desktop drives mostly still use CSS.
Anyhow, back in the early 90s, a problem with drives could occur (all using CSS back then) where the heads would stick to the platters, which wouldn't allow the platters to spin up. This was called stiction.
Today, stiction is extremely rare and essentially never happens anymore.

Abrupt bearing failure is also extremely rare. Especially now with fluid dynamic bearings.


So regarding the "smack your hard drive" idea. That worked with stiction, but since stiction is so rare now, failure to spin up is basically always a problem with the PCB or motor itself.

I've heard that the freezing trick can still work, but this is unrelated to the bearing being misaligned or the heads touching the platters (which in CSS drives, they are supposed to.)

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AR19 Anonymous User

#2 /* 67 days, 8 hours ago */

well this has never happend to me befror but if it dose i might try the freazing method but probably not the bashing method lol...

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gggggggggeorge Anonymous User

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