Hi
Just the other day I seem to have lost the 2nd HD on a desktop to a mechanical shock. It's a Samsung SpinPoint SP1613N IDE drive that for the past year was hooked up as the primary slave to an old WD that somehow lived to see another day (heavy object smashes against tower case, tower case topples over. The machine was not on at the time though).
The system would no longer power up unless I'd disconnect the Samsung as I'd get the 'disk boot failure insert system disk' error. With the defective drive connected, not even the WD would show up in BIOS. And if I disconnect the WD and only connect the Samsung as primary drive the HDD LED blinks a tad longer once followed by 3 shorter blinks, time and again. Don't know what that means.
Anyway, as the system powers up, the Samsung starts spinning, there's this toned down clickety-clack for a few seconds and then it shuts down. The noise is a lot like flipping a light switch repeatedly I suppose.
While I assume that this normally calls for professional data recovery assistance, I could certainly use an explanation as to what may be wrong as well as if there's any slight chance of getting the HD to work for any period of time to do what I should have done in the first place. Backup, obviously.
Any thought is more than welcome.Thank you very much.

If the drive is clicking then the problem is caused by one of four scenarios. Unfortunately for you it is going to be hard to determine which scenario is causing the problem and how to fix it. I'm sorry to say but start getting some quotes, otherwise if your more interested in learning something then start doing a lot of reading.

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It's physical damage. Led 3x. Send to pro and hope - there can be platter damage too. Game over.

Samsung error codes:
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13 Head Unlatch error
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Ah not 3 blinks only, I missed the long blink... then it's 13.
As the dirve is CLICKING it can't be unlatch, note that 'unlatch error' means also after unlatch the drive does not get AM in time.
My opinion is : Head(s) gone....

Thanks for your replies, guys.
I'm beginning to question whether there's any platter spinning at all. Stiction, maybe?
Though I'll admit it may simply be wishful thinking, I never did hear any scary grinding or squealing sounds, just that quiet ticking. On the other hand if there's any platter damage I'm genuinely done for. We're talking big files that were temporarily moved on that drive on Ext3 FS from a Win environment, so it has to be severely fragmented.


Could you please elaborate on that a little?

Make up your mind - does it spin as you stated or not? In any case the help of a specialist is needed. Can't help you more without seeing the drive.

13 Head Unlatch error

Drive spins up normally, but cannot unlatch the heads ( no clicking sound).
Possible reasons:

1. Mechanical problem with the latch
2. PCB (or contact) problem (less likely).

Try other PCB...

OK I took it out of the case to shield it from the noise all the fans were making. Now I'm certain platters do spin up.


The funny thing is it does both in my case. It does spin up and it does click a few times. It's like something repeatedly trips against some obstacle or like an electric motor failing to power up, I guess. Maybe the one powering up the actuator arm. I don't know much about the innards of a HD.