New member, hope someone might be able to help as I'm not finding much with searches here (could be that I'm using the wrong search terms, I don't know). Anyway, here's my issue and if anyone has any advice I'd be grateful to hear it.

I have a Dell Latitude E6400, fantastic rock solid machine, and I just finally got myself a slightly larger capacity hard drive for it (a Seagate Momentus Slim 250GB, the 7mm drive, someone gave it to me). The original factory drive is a Seagate 80GB drive, never had one issue with it, not one problem with testing and diagnostics, S.M.A.R.T. status was (up till what I'm about to describe happened) perfectly clean, not one attribute out of place.

I was using the Seagate Disc Wizard (Acronis True Image made) to do a cloning operation from the 80GB to the 250GB and I had the 250GB drive mounted in the laptop already. I had the 80GB drive attached using an eSATA-to-SATA cable to the drive's SATA port and I had a discrete power supply for the drive in use (one that I use with external drives, it works fine at this point so it wasn't the power supply).

I did the cloning operation and everything was fine, booted up off the "new" 250GB drive and everything was still fine - the 80GB was detected as a secondary drive once Windows was up and running (Windows 7 Pro x64 is my OS of choice). I could open the 80GB using Explorer and checked it out with HDTune just before this "thing" happened. Again, the drive showed perfectly fine with no issues.

I then decided to remove the 80GB and me being the idiot that I am I simply unplugged the eSATA cable from the drive itself and... well, that was that. That's all I did, seriously, I simply unplugged the eSATA-to-SATA cable from the back of the 80GB drive - power was still going to the drive from the discrete power supply, so that wasn't the problem. I wasn't powering the drive from the eSATA port (but this port, with the right cable, can power a 2.5" laptop drive externally).

I shut down, removed the 250GB drive (which was internal at that point), put the 80GB back in the drive bay and booted the machine - obviously the BIOS is now telling me the drive has a problem and it needs to be replaced.

So here's my question after that wall of text:

Can just unplugging an SATA, or even eSATA, cable really just kill a hard drive that quick and easy? I'm kinda pissed about this but I have to blame myself for not doing the proper "Safely remove hardware" step that I typically will do before removing a drive whether it's eSATA attached or USB, doesn't matter. This one time that I simply disconnected the drive and now it's totally dead. SeaTools for DOS gives me a code of 9BA89C43 and I'm about to email Seagate over it but I'm sure they'll say the typical line of BS: "It's an OEM drive, we don't support it, and no we won't even tell you what that code means either..."

It's not that I lost some data at this point, it's that I'm flabbergasted simply unplugging a data connection on a hard drive can kill it. I can imagine if I'd yanked the power cable that could cause problems with the heads/swing arm, etc, but disconnecting the data cable can do it to?

Sorry, I'm wordy. If anyone has any advice, I'd like to hear it. I can live without the 80GB drive but if there's any chance of making it functional again that would be awesome as well. Just a bit mind boggling to think this happened or <gasp> it could happen again with some other eSATA attached drive.

Needless to say I'll never do that again.

Thanks for reading...

It is no clear what problem the HDD, has if any.
Needs more advanced testing.
MHDD is a good starting point.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

The drive isn't being detected by the BIOS *properly* but for some reason it shows up as an eSATA device attached. MHDD can't see the drive either, unfortunately. SeaTools managed to see it just the one time after several reboots.

When I attach it to the eSATA port with Windows running, it takes a very very long time for Windows to note the drive is attached. Disk Management shows it as needing to be initialized, so I'll say OK to that and of course after another 15-20 seconds I get the "Drive is not responding" error so that's a wash as well.

Seagate Momentus 5400.6 80GB <<<--- That's the drive, sorry I left that info from the original post.

I wonder if it's possible that the drive is simply "stuck" in a BSY state like the 7200 series tends to have problems with, no idea but I'm curious.

This is certainly an odd story. Since you don't need the data from the 80GB drive then you lose nothing by risking more diagnosis.

As a minimum, gathering the SMART attribute data (including raw values) is a starting point for further investigation.

Personally I would run "smartctl -x" (from the smartmontools package) against this drive, using whichever OS recognises the drive and where you have the confidence - then capture the output of that command. Despite the drive's current behaviour, you might be able to run that smartctl command after installing the Windows version of smartmontools. Alternatively, if you are comfortable using Linux, then choose any LiveCD which includes smartmontools and run that smartctl -x command under Linux. Either way, then supply the smartctl -x output for readers here to review.

In addition to the SMART attribute data (which you could also gather using MHDD, as labtech kindly mentioned earlier), smartctl -x will also report the drive's internal error log which can give some history of the timing of problems, rather than just the current attribute data. This error log may give more clues about what problem(s) the drive has.

The problem is that you unplugged the drive while it was running, meaning you probably grabbed the drive, or enclosure, pulled the cable out and that was that. While the drive was spinning and heads over the platter, the power cut instantly made the read and write heads move to the ramp, but while you were unplugging the cable, the movements of your hand would be enough to cause a head crash.


Never unplug the drive by the case, always unplug from the PC point and don't touch the drive while its spun up and working, one slight vibration could kill it. Even safely removing hardware might not spin down the drive.

I assume this is what might have happened...

Shane

Well, here's at least a happy ending (for as long as it lasts):

I had made several attempts to reinitialize the drive both within Windows and from using Parted Magic, as well as trying to get MHDD to recognize it (the only tool outside Windows that ever saw the drive was SeaTools but nothing worked at all as noted).

I sat here looking at the drive for a while, was thinking about giving it the old "20 minutes inside a Ziplog back inside the freezer" trick - 'cause it does work in some situations, oddly enough - but then figured maybe if the heads or swing arm were stuck because of me disconnecting it at a specific point in time that could be fixed with... maybe... nah, couldn't possibly work, could it?

So I did it.

I took a screwdriver I have (part of a multi-bit set) that has a nice solid rubber outer covering on it and I held the Seagate drive in one hand and then tapped - with a bit of force - not only the top (label) side of the drive in a few spots, but then I tapped it along the four edges as well as some taps directly on the bottom right above the spindle of the drive motor.

I crossed my fingers (not really but you get the idea) and plugged it back into the eSATA-to-SATA cable and... well I'll be damned, it fired right up in about 1 second flat.

I had figured with the multiple initialization attempts that I'd probably have to do some data recovery if possible but nope, it's working fine at this moment and I've copied all the data (about 42GB) off it to the new 250GB drive without issues. All those files used SHA1 checksums - I'm very redundant when it comes to backing up data - and every file is accurate after the copy operations.

So, all's well that ends well at least in this particular instance. I have no idea what was going on but I will add that before I did this I plugged it in one more time and put it right up to my ear and I was able to hear the typical "click-thunk-click-thunk" constantly for 30 seconds or so then it went into an almost rhythmic "beeping" of sorts and I figured it was probably the heads scraping the platters - YIKES!!! :p

But it's working fine, S.M.A.R.T. status shows good, but I'm going to do a more thorough diagnostic with SeaTools for DOS here in a few, just wanted to post the good news.

Guess it was just "stuck" in some manner... thanks for the responses just the same, folks.

As for the suggestion that moving the drive in my hand while it's powered and spinning would cause a head crash, that's absurd, seriously. Drives are rated typically for 200-400 G's of force to cause real damage when inoperative, but they all can handle a good whack even when operational, most times at least 10 G's of force would be required to cause an actual head crash. A slight shake or two of my hand would hardly be a single G or two at most. I'm delicate with my hardware but not a pansy, certainly.

Anyway, it's working now, SeaTools for Windows just completed without errors but I'll be more confident when SeaTools for DOS finishes a Long scan and tells me what's up.

Odd indeed...

5400.6 can be difficult to deal with at times.
In addition to the already received suggestions, I would also look into a terminal output to see what the drive does.
What does the drive do after power on? Stays spinning? Any odd sounds? Etc.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

In case you didn't read the post above yours, labtech, the problem is now resolved - I tapped on the drive (unplugged and unpowered) with a screwdriver around various points on the physical drive and that seems to have "unstuck" it from whatever state it was in.

After two Long diagnostic tests as well as letting MHDD have a look at it and then zeroing the drive unpartitioned, I'm satisfied this was somewhat of a fluke and a timing thing on my part: I disconnected it at just the right moment (or wrong, depending on your point of view) to cause the drive to become unresponsive but after the past 12 hours of diagnostic testing - I really do hate losing data and drives, seriously - the drive still comes up without a single glitch of error in anything I've thrown at it.

And I promised the drive (corny, but I'm serious) I would never just yank out the cord, figuratively speaking of course, in that manner and always do a "Safely remove hardware" disconnect from this day forward.

Again, thanks for the responses...

It's called "percussive maintenance". :-)

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Oh yes, did not see your post. Well, glad it was resolved. But you got lucky, very, given what went on with the drive and the beeping..

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts