Hello everyone,

I've got a problem with my WD Scorpio Blue drive. It stopped working after I dropped it to the floor (it was in an external drive enclosure), and each time I tried powering it up, it just made the "shaft stuck siren". Whenever I tried plugging it directly to the SATA port, it either wasn't found by the BIOS at all, or failed to be ID'd by BIOS with "HDD failure, F1 to continue" prompt. MHDD wasn't of much help either: it could "talk" to the drive, but said the drive had no LBA mode, listed its capacity as 0 MB, and the drive name was blank. INITing the drive failed at RESET and RECAL.

Since the HDD didn't contain irreplacable information, I've decided to mess with it myself. After opening the lid, I tried to manually rotate the drive shaft - and it indeed was stuck. After applying enough torque, though, I've managed to get the shaft "unstuck", and after powering the drive it spinned up happily - only to spin down in about 10 or 15 seconds.

BIOS now consistently identifies a plugged in hard drive, but still can't read its name and reports an HDD failure. MHDD's INIT successfuly RESETs the drive (it starts to spin up), but RECAL still fails. It's still reported as a 0 MB non-LBA drive with no name. During the INIT, the heads are positioning themselves at about the middle of the plates.

The question is, how do I figure out what's wrong with the drive (well, besides being dropped to the floor and disassembled by an unqualified person)? Any suggestions?

are you saying the lid was removed when you repowered drive? it must have been. If so, then you may have destroyed your data. The lid/screw secures the head stack, powering the drive without this will cause heads to scrape platters.

Heads are dead, you need to change them or pay someone to do this for you. Expect to pay a fee regardless of the outcome because of your stupid actions.