Musical Maxtor

[Lump06]

Originally Posted by nutti

Just wanted to tell you I had this cellphone sound on my Maxtor DiamondMax 9+ 80gb while booting and thanks to you I could make it work! First I tried turning the HD and knock it very gently but no effect. All it took was one quick twist of 90 degrees and the motor became alive. I took it bicycling with me last week. I guess that was too much for it. It did work a few days after that. Dunno if the trip caused it though. I tried to ride smooth :-)

Well, now it's working and I sure did a backup. Let's see if it dies completely.
A lot of important data was not lost after all.

What exactly am I supposed to twist? Wifes hard drive that contains all of our family pics has this dreaded beeping sound.

Thanks

[paul9]

Lump, I believe nutti was referring to twisting the whole drive around, i.e. holding it in his hand and turning it radially as if starting to spin a top or disc.

[ScottW]

I actually thought he was referring to twisting the motor shaft.

[paul9]

Well, he never mentioned having the drive open in that post, Scott. By the way, I'd just like to congratulate you on the amazing longevity of this thread. You certainly created a monster when you posted this one.

[Lump06]

Good news!

I got mine spinning...all I did was start tapping on it while I was shutting down the system, I rebooted & after about a minute of clunk, clunk, clunk I was able to remove the important data onto another drive.

Thanks so much, this thread saved me big time.

[wera]

Anyone ever found out what the music was?

[mujjuman]

Originally Posted by Lump06

Good news!

I got mine spinning...all I did was start tapping on it while I was shutting down the system, I rebooted & after about a minute of clunk, clunk, clunk I was able to remove the important data onto another drive.

Thanks so much, this thread saved me big time.

thats great news dude.

[paul9]

Originally Posted by wera

Anyone ever found out what the music was?

Yes, if you read through the whole thread, the answer is in here somewhere.

[mattbudd54]

I have a maxtor person storage 3200 dirve and it makes exactly the same noise as described. I have no idea what to do and whether the data can be recovered because i have a lot of unreplaceble data. I cannot retrieve the diagnostic code from it to get the RMA so I do not know what to do. Anyone else have a similar problem and managed to either fix the hard drive, get the RMA or extract the data off of it. If you have can you please email me at mattbudd54@hotmail.com. Thanks if you can, help if you can't.

[najevi]

Originally Posted by grungebob

There is only a one-in-a-million; chance that this will occur. There are no tiny speakers. The sound that is heard is known as the buzz routine; that is intended to unstick heads from the media. This can only happen under very rare conditions if power is removed or spiked abnormally. The firmware routine that tries to move the actuator and heads actually causes an audible sound. On your particular drives the routine fails because the frequencies are not quite right. Tapping or beating on the drive may also unstick the heads, but there's a chance that part of the media could get damaged.

Rest assured that 2 different fixes were implemented months ago and the issue should not happen again.

Thank you grungebob for this credible explanation of the source of the 'music'.
Power outages are all to common in the area I live within Australia so that may very well have contributed to one of the Maxtor HDD's in my system failing with this musical symptom in the past week.

Since a layperson can very easily mistake this sound for a deliberate polyphonic melody of diagnostic value, it would be excellent if the Maxtor FAQ at http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/m...hp?p_faqid=481 was updated with the explanation given above. I did note that the FAQ was updated as recently as Nov-2006 so clearly somebody at Maxtor has the job of keeping the FAQ current.

As for the remedies posted within this thread, I plan to proceed with caution! I don't mind waiting until I first hear back from Maxtor re the status of my warranty and any advice they might offer.

I have used dozens of Maxtor drives since 1989 and this is the first problem I have had in over 10 years. I am not ready to trash the brand or the manufacturer. Let's not forget that Maxtor were one of the few suppliers of parallel ATA133 drives although in recent years that virtue has become less important since SATA drives became available.

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