My anecdote:<p>Around 1993 I had a Commodore Amiga with an A590 external hard drive. A big enclosure that could be connected to the expansion port on the left of an Amiga 500, containing a very precious 20MB hard disk.<p>One day, it stopped working. I tried everything but I couldn’t get it to work. A friend offered to take a look at it so I put it in my backpack and took the train to my friend. When connected to his A500, the drive worked lime a charm.<p>When I drove back home in the train I wondered what would be the matter with my A500 since it apparently made my A590 hard drive fail.<p>However, once I got home and reconnected the drive, it worked. No problem whatsoever.<p>Until two days later. It failed. You know what’s going to happen, right? Took it to my friend, it worked, took it back and it worked for two more days.<p>Turns out that disconnecting it, putting it in my bag, walking it around for a while worked just as well.<p>Turns out that disconnecting it, dropping it from 5cm / 2 inches and reconnecting it, worked just as well.<p>Which was what I did for the next four years or so. Whenever it stopped working, I disconnected it, dropped it and reconnected it.<p>Always loved the look on the face of people who witnessed me starting up my Amiga.
I have fixed a ton of drives, in general. Board replacements, swapping platters, head swaps, etc.
Some takeaways:
I started doing this under tupperware, and that worked.
I built a "cleanroom" out of a new sandblasting cabinet, and that worked better. Later i built a laminar flow bench out of a cheap kobalt tool-box and some plexiglass, and that was better still.<p>Swapping the control boards works on some makes (wd), make certain it is exactly the same model and revision. exactly.
"close enough" never worked for me, not even once.<p>By far just a slight "spin" by hand along the axis of travel of the disk, a quick gentile flicking motion, works to unfreeze the spindles of most stuck drives.<p>Some drives responded to a gentle heating of the spindle bearing with the hot air.<p>Use dd_rescue.<p>"Spinrite" is complete horse-shit, don't listen to anyone saying otherwise.<p>Most drives people brought in were just corruptions,
photorec and it's associated programs (testdisk) are also invaluable..
My story:<p>In 1996 or 97, a friend brought me his Compaq Deskpro, the SCSI HDD had stopped working. No sound at all, dead. Tried everything, checked voltages, reconnected cables trying to clear any oxidation. Wouldn't spin at all. Well, called it a night.<p>Next day, decided to take it out of the chassis for a last test, connected outside. Not only it spun, it worked fine!!! WTH????<p>Well, into the chassis it went. Nothing. Dead. Whaa..??? Outside again, it worked. In the chassis, dead. Outside, worked. Scratched my head... With it working outside, just tried to place it on top of the chassis. It spun down and stopped. Took it away, it spun up. Got it close again to the chassis, it spun down again... Scratched my head again... Gave up, left it disconnected outside for the day.<p>Next day tried it again and this time it worked outside of and in the chassis... My thoughts? The chassis was magnetized or something...<p>Worked for a couple more years.
If you Google for the word "sticktion" or "stiction" you'll find other remedies. Like putting it in a ziplock bag and freezing it, or (youch) purposefully dropping it.<p>All approaches to release a head that's stuck to a platter.
I've fixed this problem a few times (on different drives) by giving the drive a not so gentle thwack with a hammer. The trick is to hit it on the long side, which tends to dislodge the stuck heads/arm. If you hit it on the top or bottom, you're likely to break something, and hits on the short side aren't likely to achieve anything at all.
Clever! I'm stuck on a problem right now as well, I'm trying to boot an old server (Supermicro, dual CPU) to verify something and for the life of me I can't figure out what is wrong with it. It doesn't do <i>anything</i> when you power it up, even the power led on the board doesn't light up. Forcing the powersupply to 'on' does light up the LED but the system still won't boot. Already put a fresh 3V cell in it, stripped it down to the bare minimum, all jumpers in default positions, no go. And it worked perfectly fine the last time it was shut down. Highly frustrating these gremlins.
The strangest HDD failure I ever dealt with was a Toshiba notebook drive where the centre bearing had become shot. The notebook would not boot and the HDD sounded like a coffee grinder.<p>By moving the notebook in the air and trying different positions the noise changed. I was able to get the machine to eventually boot by holding the notebook in my hands at an angle and spinning myself on the spot. At the time I guess the gyroscopic forces were enough to get the bearing to sit right and the HDD to be able to spin properly. Doing so caused the drive to work long enough to get the most important files off it.<p>Definitely the strangest thing I’ve ever done to “fix” a piece of computing equipment.
I have successfully used the freezer trick a few times to recover a hard drive. It did work in those instances and I documented it here:<p><a href="https://battlepenguin.com/tech/freezing-a-hard-drive/" rel="nofollow">https://battlepenguin.com/tech/freezing-a-hard-drive/</a><p>If you can, leave the hard drive in the freezer while you access it. Only works for old spinny hard drives of course.
I had numerous HDs fail with the clicky noise when powered up. I was never able to recover any of them. Is it possible nowadays to fix these without replacing the drive controller? I remember this clicky problem forever destroyed my trust in harddrives. Are hard drives any better these days??
instead of magnet, what i used to do with ticking / corrupted drives was write full of 0, then write full of 1, then full of 0, repeat a few times. it takes frigging agents, but it kind of gets out all of the bumps in the magnetic material and smoothens it out again. fixed many broken drives doing that. ticking is often the read head getting dumped too much due to magnetic substance on the disk being piled up too much giving too much of a push to it. then the ticking will cause similar piles to form and get worse and worse.