SATA HD that will not spin up

[Modelworks]

A friend got a couple NAS that contain several 250GB hard drives.
The NAS are damaged because someone pulled the network interfaces out with the devices on and damaged the interface. Anyway I was given the NAS boxes.


I was going to salvage the drives so I removed and installed one of them.
It did not spin up when the pc booted, and the bios just shows a blank space for the sata port , normally it would show not connected or no drive.

I swap the drive back to the NAS, the NAS fans start and about 10 seconds later the drives spin up. I place the drive back on the pc and get the same results, no spin up.

So I place the drive back in the NAS and wait till it spins up, then swap just the sata cable with the pc one, keeping the drive powered. The drive shows up fine in the bios and formats, passes all test, etc.

Power off the pc and drive and restart with it connected to the pc, the drive again appears dead. Place it in the NAS and do the sata cable swap and its fine again.

I know some drives have delayed spin up, but I also have a Raid card that supports that and yet the drive refuses to spin up on anything but the NAS.

Is anyone aware of any custom firmware being used on drives to keep them from spinning up unless in the original device ? I know about locked drives, but the tools from Western Digital say the drive is not locked and that delayed spin up is disabled.

All 4 of the drives behave the same way.

The NAS are made by Allied Telesyn and don't show on their product list.

This one really has me stumped.


Edit:
Spins up , but only with linux.
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...=2248766&enterthread=y

 

[Modelworks]

Update with new info

 

[taltamir]

Drives are supposed to spin up when connected to power, even if the SATA cable is unplugged.
Your power cable is probably defective, use a different one.
You can verify it by plugging it into the power cable from the nas, and NOT plugging the SATA cable from the nas... Unless there is some sort of power cable drive lock (which i doubt) this will prove that it is a problem with your PSU since the SATA cable is unplugged from the NAS as well and it spins up...

 

[Modelworks]

It actually had to do with a key that is passed to the drive telling it to spin up.
When power is connected it goes into standby mode and waits for the key.
I didn't have the key so I found a program that just disables standby mode so it doesn't even require the key.

This is not the same as a locked drive, as this one was not locked.
It is another way it seems to keep people from accessing a drive from another system.