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Platin465 · March 2nd, 2006, 03:46 PM

In short, it's working now, here's what I did:

Hooked up on it's own IDE channel as primary. Got into BIOS and kept making it try to detect the drive. Meanwhile, hit it from right-hand side while holding it with the label facing me and the IDE ribbon cable towards the floor. Then, hit it from the bottom near the IDE cable. That's when it worked. I hope this helps others.

The longer version (totally unnecesary to read, but I had already typed it, so I'll leave it):

Well, I hooked my musical DiamondMAX 9 drive back up to a computer with about 60 gigs of free space. After trying some of the suggestions here, it's working again. I was able to get all my personal and a bunch of other things off. There was about 120 Mbs of data I couldn't get off my personal data partition, but it wasn't important stuff. I don't know how this works, but that partition was alway seen as the last drive letter whenever I put this drive into another computer. It moved everything else before having issues with this last bit, and I've been able to emty out another partition and most of a third (I had partitioned this 160 Gb drive into 5). I'm going to backup the data I've gotten so far, and then get the rest off. Thank you all for having this thread and all the data gathered here to help everyone else with this problem.

Here's how I got it working:

I set this drive on it's own IDE channel. I also set a DVD burner on it's own IDE channel (as primary) to streamline burning, etc. I connected the power from an external USB/Firewire enclosure (where the DVD burner came from) so that I could turn the drive on/off while trying to get the BIOS to recognize it. I turned the USB power on, then the computer, got into the BIOS, and started scanning the primary IDE device on that channel. First, I tried the twisting, gave it about five tries of scanning/turning off&on of the drive & turning while scanning. I noticed that if I tried scanning while the drive was off, it took only a second or so to say there wasn't anything, but much longer if the drive was on (makes sense). Then, while holding the top of the drive towards me and the IDE connector closer to the floor, I tried hitting it from the right-hand side, thinking if it had something to do with that box of little balls, it would move it away from the platter (I looked at the picture again today and I guess it's too far away to actually have made contact with the platter). That didn't work either. I then powered it off and back on, set it to detect, and hit it from the bottom, near the ribbon cable. It spun up and is now working!!!

Thank you all so much!! Your posts have been and immense help in getting my data back. I'm not sure I would have noticed that the drive wasn't spinning if I hadn't come here. Just as a piece of advice, IMO, you shouldn't open a hard drive unless you can be absolutely sure you won't get floating dust to fall on the platters. It is my understanding that if anything touches the platters, the data may no longer be retrievable. I'm sure that's not the case 100% of the time (as with the first poster). I further don't think that this thread is suggesting that people open their hard drives to fix/move something inside of it to get their drives functional again. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.

March 2nd, 2006, 03:46 PM	#129 (permalink)
Platin465 Junior Member Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 3	Data recovered! In short, it's working now, here's what I did: Hooked up on it's own IDE channel as primary. Got into BIOS and kept making it try to detect the drive. Meanwhile, hit it from right-hand side while holding it with the label facing me and the IDE ribbon cable towards the floor. Then, hit it from the bottom near the IDE cable. That's when it worked. I hope this helps others. The longer version (totally unnecesary to read, but I had already typed it, so I'll leave it): Well, I hooked my musical DiamondMAX 9 drive back up to a computer with about 60 gigs of free space. After trying some of the suggestions here, it's working again. I was able to get all my personal and a bunch of other things off. There was about 120 Mbs of data I couldn't get off my personal data partition, but it wasn't important stuff. I don't know how this works, but that partition was alway seen as the last drive letter whenever I put this drive into another computer. It moved everything else before having issues with this last bit, and I've been able to emty out another partition and most of a third (I had partitioned this 160 Gb drive into 5). I'm going to backup the data I've gotten so far, and then get the rest off. Thank you all for having this thread and all the data gathered here to help everyone else with this problem. Here's how I got it working: I set this drive on it's own IDE channel. I also set a DVD burner on it's own IDE channel (as primary) to streamline burning, etc. I connected the power from an external USB/Firewire enclosure (where the DVD burner came from) so that I could turn the drive on/off while trying to get the BIOS to recognize it. I turned the USB power on, then the computer, got into the BIOS, and started scanning the primary IDE device on that channel. First, I tried the twisting, gave it about five tries of scanning/turning off&on of the drive & turning while scanning. I noticed that if I tried scanning while the drive was off, it took only a second or so to say there wasn't anything, but much longer if the drive was on (makes sense). Then, while holding the top of the drive towards me and the IDE connector closer to the floor, I tried hitting it from the right-hand side, thinking if it had something to do with that box of little balls, it would move it away from the platter (I looked at the picture again today and I guess it's too far away to actually have made contact with the platter). That didn't work either. I then powered it off and back on, set it to detect, and hit it from the bottom, near the ribbon cable. It spun up and is now working!!! Thank you all so much!! Your posts have been and immense help in getting my data back. I'm not sure I would have noticed that the drive wasn't spinning if I hadn't come here. Just as a piece of advice, IMO, you shouldn't open a hard drive unless you can be absolutely sure you won't get floating dust to fall on the platters. It is my understanding that if anything touches the platters, the data may no longer be retrievable. I'm sure that's not the case 100% of the time (as with the first poster). I further don't think that this thread is suggesting that people open their hard drives to fix/move something inside of it to get their drives functional again. If I'm wrong about that, please correct me.