Twice now, on 2 identical drives and for no apparent reason the drives have stopped working. In both cases I was doing nothing more than accessing a file on the drive (could have needed the drive to spin up from power saving) then apps start hanging etc and the drive becomes inaccessible, making the following sound.

When booting the computer, the drive just sits there and makes a fairly quiet seeking/click sound approx every 0.7 seconds continuously.

I've tried everything I can think of on both drives just to get them back long enough to copy latest files off, including the ancient freezer method (!)

I'm going to try the Samsung tools tonight, perhaps with the acoustic mode change, following a forum post elsewhere.

Any other suggestions??

I cant believe this is not common as the drives are everywhere, and I've have 2 out of 2 develop the exact same fault 8 months apart.

Thanks.

hd501.

maybe you havent got sufficent cooling.

nope, as I said, I've even tried the freezer method, before which I had the thing in the fridge. Both had 0 effect!

Other threads hint it could be bios corruption, perhaps a fuse/resister blown etc. But where to start!

Ehhehe, quote of the day

Sorry to say hd501, but i think you just freezed your data away from normal repair. Now you have humidity problems inside too...

NEVER put your drive on FREEZER...

---EDIT---

Sufficient cooling on your computer, i think HDD Spaz meaned, that your disks are blown by overtemperature

why some people believe in freezing methods?

Because back in the good old days (I used to work repairing pc's once the greases used to go etc, meaning that mechanically things dont work quite right. Freezing was a way that could maybe fix things. It also changes the tolerences slightly, giving a little hope Electronically I suppose it could have an indirect effect of extending the time taken for things to overheat, or close/make worse a dry joint etc. Bit random and in the "nothing to loose" school of thought.

Aha, well there I did use some brains and made sure to enclose the drive in a static bag to ensure no condensation (it formed on the outside), and only cooled one of them! Either way it didnt work!

I left it to return to normal room temperature for another crack later tonight, generally the little things are a bit more robust than we give credit for, they die more because of their own problems than what we do to them!! As I said, I got 2 of these things, if I can repair either I'd be happy. If neither then sh*t happens, life sucks and all that

Also, when they died, they were certainly not hot, just warm. One of them was definitely in power save mode up until the point it died too.

Thats what I meant. I thought I was the spaz

Samsung drives have a terminal port that can tell us what is wrong

You may want to post it, but the chances of you fixing it yourself are quite low unless you wish to perform a lot of R&D. As far as costs are concerned to do it by one of us, this will be expensive.

Based on what you posted, I would be looking in the direction of a faulty power supply producing a spike and frying something or damaging the system area. Could also be a regular power surge and an expired surge protector (those things have an average lifetime of 2 years).

Sorry.

Hd501, you have headstack or MC troubles. Need to check and eventually swap headstack, and/or do a lot of work with pc3000 or similar tool. There is a small 5% chance is the pcb.

brief update...

using UBCD and hdat2 I can sorta get to a stage where I can view the file/directory structure. Unfortunately it wont recognise my usb stick atm, so I'm fighting for a way to get the things off!

I've tried re-writing the mbr etc with no apparent success, although vista will boot up (different drive) it will not recognise the existance of the broken one (which is odd because hdat2 dos util does). Is there a windows tool that would be of use perhaps?

Some util programs have trouble reading sector 0, so perhaps that got a bad sector etc, but full disk scan seems to say not. full disk scan (think it was in hdat2) also didnt produce the clicking noise.

I'm happy to breakout the multimeter etc if I knew what to look for.

Samsung diag showed no fault btw.

Thx for any help...

You need to image the damned disk. Ghost and other standard imaging tools will probably fail. My workflow is complicated, but if the disk behaves as you describe now, I can make this problem go away at a price that would pleasantly surprise you.

DO NOT attempt to work on it with utilities without a sector-level backup. You should also make a backup of its firmware, if you have that capability.

your drive head is not being landed at landing zone, not calibrating properly. my guess, still the head ok, not bad sector issue, its my past experience with the drive. Just guess (most probably my guess is right, i hope), but proper diagnose will keep out the exact result. dont use any user end utilities to make the data of the drive lost forever. Freeze-up made your journey more tough situation, may be.

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