Thread: How does a hard drive just die?

A motherboard doesnt need a harddrive to post, or boot from a floppy. sounds like something else is wrong, ie psu, motherboard, cpu, memory (id say in order of likelyhood, most to least). And usually when a drive goes, it goes pretty spetacularly, especially in a high stress environment like a car, meaning a head crash would probably be the most common, and it would make a LOUD scraping noises.

The platter speed regulation has gone tits up. Fujitsu drives seem notorius for this sort of thing. We have just had to replace more than 80 20gb fujitsu's all with this very same problem at work. All were bought at the same time, and all have failed within the space of 2 months of each other! Sometimes you will find it can stay running for a few hours, then just stop. After you reboot, the PC will say disk boot failure. Leave it off overnight and it works again. Listening carefully, you can usually hear the platter spinning up and down before shutting off. Eventually they die altogether, accompanied by a fair bit of heat.

Dump the Fujitsu and get a different drive is my advice.

This is the normal failure I see in Fujitsu and Quantum HDs. I have found that it is caused by BAD POWER, which slowly damages the drive. So before you replace it, make sure your 12V is actually 12V, and your 5V is actually 5V.

There probably isn't any way to recover the drive short of a data recovery service. Which really shouldn't matter, since you of course have backups, right?

You COULD try swapping the control board from another drive that is exactly the same. It might fix the problem enough to get your data off.

Do maxtors not come with a 3 year manufacturers warrenty anymore?

I accidently killed an IBM drive while setting up my car pc a few weeks ago.. it slid across a bit of metal and *BZZT* followed by an imediate system shutdown. When I booted back up the disc didn't even spin up, and it wasn't recognized

My backups weren't current enough to recover the data I need most off the drive.. so I'm pretty much screwed out of some important things

Since were comparing tales of dead drives; Last weekend I was going to replace my 4gb Maxtor in the car with a 10gb Western Digital that I had been hording for the occation. Unfortunatly, when I plugged it in I was using an old AT PSU in the house to run the comp, and turning on was accompanied by smoke and popping components! I should be glad it didnt damage the MB I suppose. Cant figure out what happened though, I went back and checked that AT supply and its fine.