Hi Freinds,

I am a novice with some luck in HDD repairs so far. I need enlightenment.

I have a SATA HDD 250 GB. There are incidents which could have done physical damage to it, though i am not sure about it.

2 years back this HDD stopped working and refused to get detected. It worked with one of my freind's PC but again when back to my PC it refused to get detected. It was strange.

After keeping it aside for two months, i tried a few trial and errors(actually quite many) from scratch. This time I found out that this HDD works only when it is lying outside the PC cabinet without any screws however when screwed back inside the cabinet it plays dead. Second, it works only with one screw that too when tightened till a certain specific thread. I could manage to get it working and till date it worked (ie for two years). Now, last night while attempting a recovery on a friend's HDD i attached his dead hdd to the cpu and again this HDD of mine started displaying its same behavioral pattern.

Now its morning and I could get it to work, this time with two screws. The previous screw tightened to the full while another scew a little loosely tightened.

After this ritual it works like nothing happened ever, no lags nothing. It just had that cirking sound during initial startup now it is running absolutely normal. I write this post from the same HDD, I have my OS running on it.

With luck on my side, it is working but this piece of hardware is the i think one of the few only thing in the world which works only when screwed.

Please enlighten.

What is happening.

Probably screws are too long, and touching PCB through the screw hole.

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Thanks Pcimage fr your inputs. But if that is the case, the HDD works only when screw touches the PCB. Does that not raise eye brows?

What makes my HDD so sensitive that it requires holy screwing to execute its routine duties.

HDD with a soul..;-p

If there is nothing "touching" it's just mechanical issue and there's nothing you can do except copying data from it (if important) and replace.

HDDs are , despite the appearance and cost, extremely precisely manufactured and rely on tight tolerances. IF the disk has been shocked or misused, thre are parameters that are changed so even the microscopical changes in the chassis structure when you screw it to the case DO MATTER.

Too technical to explain here and also useless, so in the end it's a backup and replace scenario.