Hard drive gets no power

if data is critical, send it to a recovery service.

then if drive is under warranty, get a new one

my experince>>

after "Drive D: is unwritable, data may be lost" message and a nice blue screen, i knew i was in trouble

had a Compaq 18Gb scsi ultra drive go up in smoke, literally. my system is open frame, can see everything!

one chip gave out a hissing plume of nasty acrid smoke and and a nice tiny hole where it came from.

no spin,no nothing after that!

i had an exact model that was a spare that did everything except id. so i swapped the controller board (4 screws,easy!)

from power on until i recvd minor error msgs complaining about unable to write to the disk everything worked fine.

i could not write to the drive, but i was able to completely READ it !!

found some DVDs and started to tediously offload. at least i had the contents back.

you may have blown an onboard fuse, or other, but most really "dead" drives are really "dead" beyond use. spindle motor could be crapped too.

First off you will have to determine why the drive isn't getting power. If another drive will power up on the same plug then either the drive's motor or the integrated controller is bad. If you had EXACTLY the same controller board on an identical WD drive you could try to swap them. However, chances are slim that you will be able to repair the drive if it is at fault. If you cannot live without the data on the drive you can send it out to be recovered. Here is one of many offering such a service:

But be aware that in most cases these services are expensive.

Good luck.

At least twice before I have read that a hard drive placed in a freezer overnight will sometimes help restore the data for a while. cuhulin

A hard drive factory's specialised test jigs and fixtures.

Bin it.

Graham

In your description of the problem, does "power up" really mean "spin up"?

If so, and you're out of other options and ready to replace the drive anyway, try the following: remove the drive from the chassis. Hold it with your fingertips and apply power. With power applied, give the drive a little horizontal bump with the heel of your hand, see if it spins up then. I've had drives get "stuck" in the past, and more than once this has worked for me to get them spinning again. You want to slightly jar the drive in the same plane as the platter(s) in the drive.

Of course, if it does work, immediately make a copy of the contents of the drive, then replace it. Chances are it'll just stick again if you try to keep using it.

Some day, all mechanical hard drives will be replaced with solid state drives.They are showing up already in some computers. cuhulin

They've been around for decades, but capacity and cost per unit of storage still lag substantially behind that of magnetic discs, so it'll be a while yet before conventional hard drives go away.

Things that are coming out of the factories and off the assembly lines right now are already old hat compared with the things coming out tomorrow. WebTV boxes don't have hard drives.The first models did, but that was only for the WebTV TV side, for storing tv programs/titles to be scrolling across the bottom of the tv screens one minute before the tv programs start on tv.It is solid state nowadays.I use mine all the time. cuhulin

I'm well aware of the current state of SSD technology. The drive you linked to is a tiny 32GB capacity and the price is astronimical at over $500. That's enough money to purchase several terabytes of magnetic disc space, while a 40GB hard drive can be had for under $50, I don't think anyone even manfactures anything less than 80GB anymore even in laptop drives.

For an appliance like webtv (I didn't know they were still in business) solid state storage makes sense, but for most computer users who want hundreds of gigabytes for storing audio and video media on top of today's bloated software, traditional hard drives are still far in the lead as has been the case since I first saw them in the mid 1980s and I see no signs of that changing any time soon. At that time 20MB was a decent hard drive and SSD cards were in the 256KB range but the price to capacity comparison was similar..

My first hard drive was $30,000.00 per gigabyte. (Specifically, it was $600 for 20 megabytes. Dreaming of a gigabyte was a cerebral exercise.)

Geez, that cheap? What did DEC RK05s go for when they were state-of-the-art? :)

--- sam | Sci.Electronics.Repair FAQ:

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I should only dream of having that kind of money. I'm talking about the Seagate ST-225 for my first drive, the big price breakthrough on the Winchester drive type. I still have a few of them and I bet they work if I can find a computer with an ISA bus to plug the controller into. They had a superfast 65 ms access time, much better than the 120 ms times of earlier drives.

I still have an XT over at my mom's place with the 30MB RLL version of that drive, unfortunately I tried to fire it up about a year ago and the hard drive made some unhealthy noises and I got a boot error :(

They had a stepper chip for the head stepper motor that would go out, and was replaceable. I repaired one drive this way. You might be able to salvage it if that's the problem.

THIS is a hard drive

GG

That's what they say, but it sure looks like drum storage to me.

yep, those things need to be "excercised"once in a while.

older types used grease that gets thick and often glues it together instead of lubes it

moisture KILLS electronic stuff over time, regular use actually heats it enough to drive off most of it.

i try to start up my older stuf at least once a month for an hour or two, just to keep it alive and dry.

basements are BAD BAD BAD to work in!

$500.

anyone

exercise.)

that

actually, i think this is where the cymbals (symbols) were placed........... ;-))

was

exercise.)