Hard Drive Failure - Spins Up/Spins Down

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Hard Drive Failure - Spins Up/Spins Down

The hard drive in my G3 seems to be in a bad way. When I turned it on today it spun up, started to read the disk, then after 1/2 second it spun back down. Then it repeated the cycle over several times before I shut the whole thing off. It's a 120 GB Western Digital Caviar EIDE drive that I installed to replace the original drive almost 5 years ago. I'm still using the original drive controller, but the rest of the machine has been through various upgrades - G4 ZIF, Firewire and USB cards, display card, etc.

I did a little troubleshooting. Put the original drive in and it spins up and reads the boot sector (it won't boot, but I think I may have wiped it when I took it out of the G3). The Caviar exhibits the spin up/read/spin down/repeat behavior even when the data cable is not attached. I thought the power supply might be letting me down, so I hooked the drive up to the power supply of an old 8500 I have (don't have another IDE machine), and got the same results.

I'm thinking the prognosis is not good, but would appreciate any suggestions on how to troubleshoot this further and maybe get this thing back on line. Also, if anyone has any advice about data recovery services, I'd appreciate that too. I think it may be cost prohibitive (that and a new HD would go a long way to buying a new Mac), but I'd like to hear of any experiences/suggestions. I have a back-up drive, but haven't been super religious about keeping it current.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Beige G3 Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Beige G3, Mac OS X (10.2.x)

Posted on Oct 16, 2006 6:53 PM

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Answer 1

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Thomas Bryant

Level 6

13,881 points

Oct 16, 2006 7:38 PM in response to mymojo

Hello! My experience with drives is that when one won't spin up is long gone. It has to spin up to a certain rpm and "lock in" or sustain that speed to be able to mount. If the drive won't stay spun up any data recovery from it would be expensive. Tom

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Answer 2

Jeff

Level 6

12,058 points

Oct 16, 2006 8:01 PM in response to mymojo

The problem(s) with your drive may be electronic and/or hardware-related, but if it doesn't remain spinning, software-based options for data recovery can be ruled out. Professional data recovery services are quite expensive, because after evaluation, the drive often requires disassembly (in a sterile environment), and any failing parts are replaced to enable extraction of the data from the platters. Businesses can write off this expense, but for the home computer user, spending in excess of $1,000 is a bit expensive. An online search will provide the names of companies specializing in data recovery. If you're reasonably certain that you've backed up essential files, I'd just replace it with a new one. A good price for a 120 GB drive is around $50 (USD), which is undoubtedly far less than what you paid five years ago.

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Answer 3

mymojo Author

Level 1

0 points

Oct 31, 2006 8:15 AM in response to Jeff

Appreciate the help, but ended up going out and finding a solution that worked for me and got the old disk back on line at least temporarily.

After doing some research around the web, I decided to try freezing the drive. This was suggested as a possible hack to get a drive with failing bearings back on line. This fix obviously doesn't work for most disk failure modes, but I was pretty sure that the heads hadn't crashed and that the bearings were the problem. I put the drive in a zip lock bag and stuck it in the freezer compartment for a couple hours. When I took it out and stuck it back in the Mac, it worked like a charm. I ran it for at least 10-15 hours first backing it up and then trying to make a working clone (that's another story) and, except for a couple of minutes where it was howling, the drive worked fine. It finally stopped again, but another round in the freezer has fixed it so far.

Like they say, your mileage may vary, but this trick worked for me and I managed to salvage all of the files that weren't on my latest back-up.

BTW, there are a few companies advertising on the web that claim they to do data recover for less than $1K. Nationwide claims a flat rate of $499 I think. Can't vouch for them though.

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