What to check if you think your hard drive has gone bad.
The most common problems originate from corruption of the master
boot record, FAT, or directory. Those are soft problems which
can usually be taken care of with a combination of tools like
Fdisk /mbr to refresh the master boot record followed by a reboot
and Norton disk doctor or Spinneret.
The most common hardware problems are a bad controller, a bad
drive motor, or a bad head mechanism.
1. Can the BIOS see and identify the hard drive correctly? If
it can't, then the hard drives onboard controller is bad.
2. Does the drive spin and maintain a constant velocity? If
it does, that's good news. The motor is functioning.
3. If the drive surges and dies, the most likely cause is a bad
controller (assuming the drive is cool). A gate allowing
the current to drive the motor may not be staying open. The drive
needs a new controller.
4. Do you hear a lot of head clatter when the machine is turned
on and initialized (but before the system attempts to
access the hard drive). Head clatter would indicate that the spindle
bearings are sloppy or worn badly. Maybe even lose and
flopping around inside.
5. There is always the possibility that the controller you are
using in the machine has gone south.
6. If the drive spins, try booting to the A> prompt, run Fdisk
and check to see if Fdisk can see a partition on the hard drive.
If Fdisk can see the partition, that means that it can access
the drive and that the controller electronics are functioning
correctly. If there is no head clatter, it may be just a matter
of disk corruption which commonly occurs when a surge hits you
machine and overwhelms the power supply voltage regulator. It
commonly over whelms the system electronics allowing an EM pulse
to wipe out the master boot record, file allocations table, and
primary directory. Fdisk can fix the master boot record and Norton
Disk Doctor can restore the FAT and Directory from the secondaries.
7. The drive spins but Fdisk can't see it. Try the drive in
another system and repeat the test to confirm that Fdisk can't
read through the drives onboard controller. If it sees it in another
system, then your machines hard drive interface is\ bad. You can
try an upgraded or replacement controller card like a Promise
or CMD Technologies (there are others) in you machine after disabling
the integrated controller in the BIOS, but if the integrated controller
went south, it may just be symptomatic of further failures and
you'd be wise to replace the motherboard. Trying the drive in
another machine also eliminates the variable that your machines
12 volt power output being bad.
8. If you get head clatter but a constant velocity on the drive
motor (no surging), you might try sticking the hard drive in the
freezer for about 12 hours. This is an old trick from back in
the days of the MFM/ESDI driver era. This can cause the drive
components to shrink enough to make the track marker align with
the tracks. We don't see that kind of platter spindle wear much
anymore, but back in the old days, the balancing and bearings
weren't as good. Still, under the right circumstances, it might
help. It would depend on how old
the drive is and how many hours of wear have occurred. You have
to be quick to get your info off the drive when it works. Back
then, the drives were much smaller, so there wasn't so much to
copy. So, go after the important data first.
9. The drive doesn't spin. Either the onboard controller is bad
or the motor is bad (assuming you did try the drive in another
machine). It's time to hit the net and local independent shops
to see if you can locate another drive of the same make and model
that's good. Since the drive is probably an older drive and no
longer in distribution, your best bet is to find an identical
used drive. If you know someone with the same make and model,
you might be wise to try and persuade them to sell you their drive
with an offer of providing them with a free upgraded drive. If
you can locate an identical drive, start with the controller replacement
... this is the simplest and least invasive. If swapping the controller
doesn't produce the desire result, you can tear into the drive
and swap the motors. While you have both drive opened up to accomplish
this, scrutinize the platters, heads and armatures. You might
even hook the drive up and power it from a system with both drives
attached. This way, you could see anything that deviates between
the actions of both drives when they are initialized. Swapping
patters is unlikely to produce any positive result. They are a
balanced system like the tires on your car and I suspect that
the balance will be different for each drive as will other variables.
10. There's always Ontrack Corp. who will attempt to recoup your
info starting at $500 and going up from there. They don't fix
and return the drive either. If the info is all that important
to you, I would seek some professional and experience technician
in your locality who makes his living from servicing and building
computer systems.. not just selling them. If you have had much
experience salvaging information from bad hard drives, your likelihood
of success is low. In the case of soft corruption, all utilities
have their eccentricities. Often times, Norton Disk Doctor will
go too far (if you let it). It's wise to just let those utilities
small steps and then have a look at the drive and see if you can
copy it off. Norton will go so far as to rename directories and
files, and even delete them or break them up into fragments which
are useless.
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