HD crash-NAC (SteveR)

[David Michael]

Steve,

If the drive is truly not spinning up (ie - the drive makes NO "whirring"
sound), AND its fairly old (at least 5 years), then there is some chance you
can recover by "helping" the spinup process. To do that, you need to remove
the drive from its mounting bracket and hold it your hand (de-ESD yourself
first). Just after you hit the power button on the computer, you need to
rapidly "twist" the drive approximately around the spindle axis. It is VERY
important that you twist in the right direction, because if it's the type of
drive where the heads land on the disk, and you twist the wrong way, you are
likely to very permanently and unrecoverable wreck the drive (by buckling
the suspensions and/or tearing the heads off the suspensions). The "right
direction" is whichever direction will put the suspensions in tension. For
MOST drives, this means rotating the case CW when looking at the cover (ie,
the disks normally turn CCW, but you are rotating  the case "around" the
disks).

If the drive IS spinning up, but not loading heads (ie, you hear a whirring
sound, several "clicking" sounds, and then the whirring stops), then you are
out of luck with anything relatively simple......

Good luck

Dave
90 200QA