Hard disk won't spin up

ask if there were any power surges. sounds like toast to me though.

ask if there were any power surges. sounds like toast to me though.
put in a boot disk and restart. start computer without cd rom support. type in fdisk at the a: prompt. hit enter until you come to select 1 to 4. 4 should be display partition.
if you can't get that far than it is gone. if you see no partition, it is gone. if not active than select to make it active.
sounds like toast to me though.

If the problem is tight spindle bearings you may be able to free them by removing the drive and slap it on a hard surface. you have nothing to loose at this point.

One other possible fix would be to get an exact duplicat of the drive and start swapping the board parts. Tech republic does have the 200 ways to revive a dead hard drive article. All this may be in vane. Have you tried it as a secondary in a different pc?

Another option is to connect it to another computer to secondary. The problem sector may be in MBR, and thus if you do not boot to it, you may be able to recover data from it.

Data Recovery specialists may also be able to recover data from it. I wouldn't recommend banging it around too much.

there's a word document in the downloads section of TechRepublic called "200 ways to revive a hard drive" and there is a lot of good info there. Used the suggestion of putting the hd in the freezer (believe it or not), and it worked!

there's a word document in the downloads section of TechRepublic called "200 ways to revive a hard drive" and there is a lot of good info there. Used the suggestion of putting the hd in the freezer (believe it or not), and it worked!

The noise you are hearing is the head armature smacking against the end stop! The drive is totalled. Swapping the controller card for one from an identical drive may resolve the problem long enough to recover critical data, but in 9 cases out of 10,you will more than likely trash the new controller card. It can be done, but be prepared to write off a second drive.

Thanks for all the help, folks. I'd read "200 ways to revive a hard drive", and that's where I got the initial hints from - a very helpful article. I'd already tried putting the disk in as a secondary but the system couldn't see it. The controller board showed no signs of frying. When I eventually admitted defeat, I opened the drive up just to see if I could learn any lessons for the future. There was evidence that heads had made somewhat uncomfortable contact with the top platter, and it appears that there was a bearing problem that was making the whole thing try to run wonky... So,
a)yes, the disk was toast
b)my colleague has a lot of typing to do and
c)wholegrain bread with strawberry jam tastes much nicer toasted than a hard disk!
Have a nice Christmas!

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