HD experts! Is this the sound of a dying hard drive?!

[billandopus]

I'm trying to save data for my bro-in-law from his HD, an "old" Quantum cx 6.4gb drive. I've hooked it up to my comp as a slave and i'm trying to migrate stuff over.

Anyways, this is a description of what kind of sounds i'm getting out of his HD.

"Ping! Ping! Swirl!" - It sounds like a small metal ball or a metal BB is going around in circles in a glass cup. It powers up, temporarily freezes and slows spinning - and then it powers up again and spins. It will then try to spin again (usual hard disk activity) and freeze and then I get an error message saying that the HD was unable to write and save your data ... due to either a hardware or network failure ... blah, blah, blah.

So, is this the sound of impending death?

Or can one actually try to fix these things? I'm tempted to open up the HD and see what's cooking but since i've never done that before AND it's my bro-in-law's HD i'm gonna refrain for the moment.

Any shared experiences and knowledge would be appreciated.

 

[SemperFi]

Get your data off of the drive ASAP. If you want to be sure the drive is trash goto maxtor website and download utilities to test your quantum drive. When you have confirmation the drive is trash and I am assuming that the warranty period is up. Then you can open it up. look it over there may be some nice magnets in there to scavenge. Once you open a drive up in a non cleanroom the dust in the air will render the drive useless in a short period of time.

Semper Fi

 

[billandopus]

Yah, managed to get some data offa there. It's still acting up. Kinda funny actually ... but it wouldn't be so funny if it was my own HD.

Funny thing happened though. Out of interest I tried to run Norton Disk Doctor on e: (the dying drive) and got an interesting error message saying "structural errors ..." and all that. "Failed to write. Data has been lost ..."

FYI, I have my one and only HD partitioned into c: and d: and e: being my plextor. I removed the dying drive which was f: and upon reboot after the Norton Disk Doctor thing I now have f: which reports to have the same size as my partitioned d: (data) drive but reporting a different free space number. It shows up under my computer but it's not part of the device manager. I'm running XP Pro BTW.

Weird. The folders in f: were labelled in strange ASCII-like text making no sense. I can't seem to remove it or what.

Anybody seen this before?