Dead Drive: Any ideas?

[manlymatt83]

I have a dead 160 GB IDE drive that I'm trying to power up to get the data off of it. The "freezer trick" hasn't worked - it made it power up slower, but the click click, click click still occurred fairly immediately and I wasn't able to get it to work.

Does anyone else have any ideas? The drive definitely powers up, and I read somewhere that you can sometimes open the drive up and "fix" the reader or something to make it work again.

 

[PandaBear]

Opening the drive up usually will get some contamination on it that will make things worst, but if it is already busted then it could be a last resort to see if the head is stuck on the disk unable to climb back on to the parking ramp.

Freezer trick only helps if the actuator was stuck or bond to something sticky. The typical click you hear is usually the head not able to read off the drive when it first landed or get out of park position, and go back and try again. It is probably the worst type of errors out there.

Does your bios report the correct model number of the HD? I know some of the HD has firmware on the drive that if fail to initialize, the only thing MB will do is show its drive name as something weird like "MaXtOr"

 

[manlymatt83]

Originally posted by: PandaBear
Opening the drive up usually will get some contamination on it that will make things worst, but if it is already busted then it could be a last resort to see if the head is stuck on the disk unable to climb back on to the parking ramp.

Freezer trick only helps if the actuator was stuck or bond to something sticky. The typical click you hear is usually the head not able to read off the drive when it first landed or get out of park position, and go back and try again. It is probably the worst type of errors out there.

Does your bios report the correct model number of the HD? I know some of the HD has firmware on the drive that if fail to initialize, the only thing MB will do is show its drive name as something weird like "MaXtOr"

It was in an external hard drive enclosure. So I don't quite know what the BIOS said as it was attaching via USB. But yeah, it's doing the click click. if I open the drive up, am I almost guaranteed to cause data loss?