My persnickety hard drive is grumbling after a mere two years of abusive overuse.
From time to time, it’ll just give up and start pouting. (The “pouting” sound is a repeating “tick tick tick tick… tick tick tick tick… tick tick tick tick…”)
Whatever application is trying to access the drive will hang up completely.
When I run Scandisk, it consistently hangs up and starts pouting at Cluster #28,469, which I guess is the damaged area of the disk.
Is there some way I can mark that portion of the drive as “No Man’s Land” as in the days of those honkin’ Winchester drives that started to gradually fail from the get-go and so spawned little utilities to do just that? (I’m running Windows Me.)
Don’t push the drive, get a new one, backup important files, so on and so forth. Soon enough that drive is gonna die, and if your OS happens to be on it, you’ll probably have to reinstall it (your OS).
As for taking it apart…, great idea. I’ve done so with many old drives, although it wasn’t so much ‘taking apart’ and slamming it against something hard until the vacuum broke and I could finally start prying the thing apart. The really cool thing about taking them apart, at least in older HDs, are the magnets. You can find these really powerful, little magnets in there, and who doesn’t like magnets?
Sorry to be pedantic, but there isn’t a vacuum inside your hard drive, they get so hot because of the friction between the air and the plattens / heads…
As to the OP you should remove the HDD to a working PC and try to duplicate its contents ASAP (Norton’s GHOST is very good).
milk milk is correct about the lack of vacuum. A disk drive wouldn’t work if it was vacuum inside. The distance between the head and the disk is maintained by the disk riding on a few microinches of air. There is an air bearing design etched into the head which keeps this distance nearly constant across the stroke.
dakravel is, of course, correct in that magnets are way cool.
Haj, who at one time in his storied career designed air bearings for disk drives.
Disk drives are cheap enough these days that it’s not worth the effort or the risk to try and rescue a dying drive. If I were you I’d get a new drive, install your OS of choice on it, then copy all of the important data off of the old drive and slowly work on reinstalling all of the apps you use. It might be a bit of a pain to get your OS reinstalled and to have to reload all of your important apps but better to have to do it when you can set aside the time to do it properly instead of waiting till the old drive dies and you have to do the install instead of actual work.
Also I’ll second the comments that hard drives are fun to take apart. Just don’t beat the hell out of it and try to crack it like a nut though. You’ll probably have to get a set of torx drivers to do this, those are those funky * shaped screws that hold most drives together. After you get the top cover off, plug the drives power into a PC power supply. Watching the platters spin up and the heads whip around when the drive powers up is good for several minutes of entertainment. When that gets boring rip the magnets out, they are located in that steel enclosure at the base of the arms that hold the drive heads. Hard drives have at least a pair of rare earth magnets which are quite powerful and very fun to play with. I keep a couple hanging on one of the steel corner seams on my wall to hold my keys.
As far as backing up goes, ironically enough, that seems to be the proverbial dessicated cereal stalk that has prostrated this particular humped ungulate. Housekeeping for '04 has involved moving nine gigs (so far) of media files off the drive, many of which had to be unpacked from ridiculously huge archive files before burning. For the time being, I think I’ve identified what actions to avoid to prevent it from crashing, and my back-up is proceeding according to precedent.
A few hours have passed, and I’m resigned to replacing the drive. It is the system drive, so it’ll be a pain in the ass. Ah well, out with the old, in with the new.
With regard to taking it apart, I’ve got a veritable elephants’ graveyard of NFG/obsolete hard drives, and I’ve never been tempted to take any of the wee ones apart. Now, the 1980’s were a time when dead/obsolete hard drives were a joy to sledge-and-wedge. Back then, you might find several heavy 12" ferric-oxide-coated platters, which, when dragged up to windy Long Beach for drunken weekend camping excursions with UBC engineering buddies, provided great amusement as potentially lethal frisbees and, when thrown straight up as high as you could manage, never failed to entertain by hitting the hard-packed sand rolling in the direction of the wind, straight for the boiling sea, where they would be lost forever if you couldn’t run fast enough to retrieve them. They made for spectacular head wounds if you happened to be standing under one as it came down and were too drunk to dodge it, too. Good times.
Somehow I suspect that dissecting today’s technology will fail to entertain as well as that.
On preview, TheFunkySpaceCowboy has sold me on taking the cussed thing apart. I’ve got an old pentium in my closet that’ll suit for that, I think.
As was mentioned above, invest a few bucks in Norton’s Ghost, which allows you to take an exact image of your disk and transfer it to a new one. No more difficult than partitioning a new drive (although it takes longer). Once you’re done you just boot of the new disk and your troubles are (or at least this one particular trouble is) over.
Hmm. I agree with the “back it up to something else…quick!” theme of the rest of the thread, but failures limited to a specific area of the disk sound more like a format or minor media failure than a wholesale failure of the drive. The rest of the disk may be fine.
Disks are cheap, but they’re not worthless, so AFTER you’ve moved the contents, note the exact number of bytes that Windows (or whatever) thinks the disk has, then do a low-level format on the drive, and see if that number went down. If so, you’ve probably managed to format around the problem, and that drive may serve you well for many years to come (I’d use it for something like a download or digital video scratch drive, since you probably won’t trust it completely for some time.)
Of course, if you have no use for gigabytes of disk space you can’t trust, just toss it. Time and effort are worth money, too.