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From: Franc Zabkar on 7 Mar 2010 19:18
On Sat, 6 Mar 2010 13:52:33 -0800 (PST), karotto
<manfromvie(a)gmail.com> put finger to keyboard and composed:

>Hi,
>Just as I was going to back up my 1.5TB drive to my other, identical
>drive I dropped it while spinning. It was in a case and did not hit
>hard yet it won't spin up any more. I MUST get the data off it. When I
>plug it in it beeps (buzzes) periodically but does not spin up. There
>are no dents or any signs of damage? Any ideas how to save the data?
>My last resort will be to back up the second drive then open both
>drives and pull the discs off the good drive and put the discs of the
>dropped drive inside and hope it will work. I realize I don't have a
>clean room but perhaps I can do it anyway. This is just the last
>resort. I hope some of you might have another ingenious idea to get it
>to spin up. Thank you very much. Karotto

If the drive was dropped whilst it was spinning, then it may have
suffered a head crash, which means that there will most likely be
media damage, or head damage, or both. Very often the spindle motor
bearing is seized. Replacing the motor is a major job. :-(

Here are some sound samples from failed drives:

http://datacent.com/hard_drive_sounds.php

http://web.archive.org/web/20051016010750/http://www.hitachigst.com/hddt/knowtree.nsf/cffe836ed7c12018862565b000530c74/4b1a62a50f405d0d86256756006e340c?OpenDocument

There is a slim chance that the failure to spin up is due to stiction,
if the heads have come to rest on a smooth section of the platters
rather than their normal landing area.

See this Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiction#Hard_disk_drives

- Franc Zabkar
--
Please remove one 'i' from my address when replying by email.
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