Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Old SCSI Quantum Fireball SE - angry buzz, partially working

June 14th, 2020, 12:04

Hi all,

I've got an ancient SCSI Quantum Fireball SE with an issue. It's in an old Power Macintosh 7200/120.

When I turn the computer on, the computer does start booting into the operating system - I get a Happy Mac, then the Welcome to Mac OS 8.6 comes up. So, the hard drive at least works a little.

However, not too long in the boot process, the hard drive starts making an angry buzzing noise - then a tick-tick - then another buzzing noise, etc. You can hear this starting around 00:20 in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucAU_tFm1uU.

It's not the end of the world to me if this disk dies, so I carefully removed the lid to see what was happening. I still can't figure out why the buzzing noise is occurring - here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oczo3wnYLAk&feature=share.

Any ideas on what could be the issue with this drive? I've heard that the angry buzzing is a symptom of the drive dying, but I am curious what part of the drive is actually failing.

Re: Old SCSI Quantum Fireball SE - angry buzz, partially wor

June 16th, 2020, 19:23

Anyone have any ideas before I toss it?

Re: Old SCSI Quantum Fireball SE - angry buzz, partially wor

June 17th, 2020, 12:09

Sure:

1. Never open a drive outside of a clean room. Bad move - you've hurt your chances for recovery.

2. The drive likely has bad sectors, and probably could [have been] successfully bit copied, and data recovered.
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