The hard drive in this TechRepublic Video is a 40GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8. A couple weeks ago, it failed.

One day, when the system booted up, the hard drive started making the noises you hear in the video and the BIOS wouldn’t recognize the drive. Fortunately, this was only a test machine used on trial and beta versions of various kinds of software so no data was lost.

Once the drive failed, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to remove the sticker, as I do in the video. I found the air filter (also removed in the video), which must equalize the pressure inside and outside of the drive and removed that as well.

I realized that the read-write heads and the platters were visible through the hole, so I plugged the drive back into the power supply and watched the heads move across the platters, beep, move back, and make a clicking noise. I’m not sure what exactly is causing the beeping because I doubt the hard drive has a speaker in it. If any readers have an insight as to what could be causing the beeping, I’d be interested in hearing.

The video was taken using a Kodak EasyShare CX7430 4.0 Megapixel Digital Camera. Unfortunately there was no way to put the video portion of the camera into a “Macro” mode, so that’s why the video is a little fuzzy.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this, my first ever, video and blog post.