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I agree. Percussive maintenance works much better on fan
bearings than it does on a hard disk. Don’t hit it.
Like Laurence said, your symptom could be due to software
corruption and have little to do with the mechanical hd. Have you rebuilt the Windows
XP installation since you purchased the PC in 2001?
If it were me, I would borrow Mr. Tigner’s USB adapter cable to
help recover the data. I purchased one of these myself long ago and have used
it countless times to bail friends out of trouble.
Here is the model I have, although mine is branded by Vantec the
Rosewill model is the same thing:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119152
(As a side note, the power supply that comes with this unit is
actually nicer than the one I have.)
Good luck!
-Nicholas
From: MSU Network
Administrators Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of tigner
Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 9:34 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] How hard should you hit an ailing hard drive?
Hi Richard,
I can loan you an external USB IDE adapter and power supply.
You have to remove the old disk, and connect it to the USB/IDE
adapter , which will then allow you to connect to another machine
via USB to attempt to recover what can be recovered.
I'm in BPS room 1230, phone 884 5538.
On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 22:20 -0500, Richard Wiggins wrote:
My wife's home computer, a very kewl as of 2001 Gateway
desktop-and-monitor PC, died today. The hard drive is able to begin to
boot Windows XP -- you see the logo -- so that implies that some data is
loading from the disk. However you hear lots of seeking noises, and
ultimately no finding.
We probably don't have much data to salvage on it. I find that in a cloud computing world, I've Gmailed just about anything of importance to her or to whaterver person I'm working with.
Still, I would like to take one last look at the hard drive. So my question is, and I'm not kidding -- how hard do I hit it? Do I pick up the unit and drop it? Do I take a rubber mallet to it? Do I gently tap it as it tries to boot?
Reminds me of a wisecrack circa 1979 -- on a clear disk, you can seek forever.
Thanks,
/rich
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Barry A. Tigner |