Hard drive broken by speaker magnet?

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Hard drive broken by speaker magnet?

Hello everyone,

the worst happened to me yesterday, I left my macbook on top of my home theater's subwoofer (just a small box) all night long and today when recovering from sleep it suddenly froze. I tried quitting applications but the only way to go was to reboot holding down the power button for 4 secs. After that it wouldn't start again, all what the hard drive does is a strange clicking noise (something like clac clac clac) and after that nothing until a folder with a question mark shows up.
I can boot up from a live dvd (tried disk utility from the OSX's discs and a linux distro) but the hard drive is not recognized anymore. I've taken it out of my macbook and connected it to my windows desktop pc (with the sata transfer and sata power cables from that computer's hard drive which do fit) but the hard drive is not recognized on the bios setting's screen.
I'm pretty certain that all the info on the disk is lost (which is a horrible loss) but is it possible that the hard drive was so damaged by the speaker magnet that it won't longer be usable?
I appreciate any info or experiencies on the subject, thx in advance,

Guido.

Macbook, Mac OS X (10.4.10), 2 Ghz Core Duo, 2 GB RAM, 60 GB HD

Posted on Oct 21, 2007 4:38 AM

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Answer 1

First Magus

Level 7

21,299 points

Oct 21, 2007 4:56 AM in response to snowmusicman

See this article. http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,116572-page,1/article.html

I think it is a coincidence and your hard drive may have just croaked. The near field of a magnet is not very large and unless you had a monster woofer speaker it would be doubtful this was the problem. Just to be safe never have a magnet to close to the drive. If the drive gets in the magnets near field and stays long enough damage can occur.

If your under warranty call Apple. If your not take this opportunity to upgrade the drive. The 250 GB drives are under $200.00 USD. You could probably pick up a new drive in Germany fairly cheap. Doubtful you will be able to recover any data since the drive is no longer recognized.

You might also consider an external hard drive to make backups on. SuperDuper is a good program for this.

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Answer 2

snowmusicman Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 21, 2007 5:41 AM in response to First Magus

Thx for such a quick reply. I doubt that it's a coincidence though since it's the first time that I've ever left my laptop on top of the subwoofer for such an extended period (I left it there for a sec and completely forgot about it after I went to bed). It's an 8-inch subwoofer for the rec.
Anyway I've seen harddrives crash due to speaker magnets, I work as a sound engineer live most of the times and saw once a guy leaving his laptop on top of the speaker monitoring for a few minutes and the computer crashed afterwards. So the PC World article (which I saw before googling for info) maybe refers to home use environments only.
Too bad I'm out of warranty now, so I guess I'll have to grab a new HD, it really upsets me because I just bought a 500 GB extern HD but I didn't have the time to backup. Has anyone tried a 7.2k rpm HD on a macbook? I'm concerned it might get too hot on the already too hot macbook... Anyway I'm going to go to an Apple Center and see if something can be done.

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