Having moved house recently, I was dismayed when one of my PC's (the one that's built for music and video editing) refused to boot. The primary hard disk was not being recognised by the BIOS. Dammit. Now yes, I have all the important data backed up, but it's pretty tough to backup full quality video footage at the best of times, and this box has had years of tweaking put into it, so rebuilding it from scratch was a rather sphincter-puckering concept. Having a couple of weeks paternity leave to sort it out, I started ringing around the pro data rescue market, and the prices were all in the $2,000 range. Hell, I could just buy a whole new box for that.
So being a software guy, I rang my buddy the hardware guy and told him my story, of how the box had been running happily for 18 months without being turned off, then it was shut down for a couple of weeks during the house move/new baby transition. "Ah-hah", says he, "just get out the hairdryer and heat that drive up for 20 minutes; it'll boot first go". And bugger me if he wasn't right on the money! A quick plug in of a new drive onto which I ghost-ed the dying one, switcheroo and off we go.
Phew!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Is this some kind of heat expansion thing or what?
ReplyDeleteI guess so. My buddy explained that modern hard drives are assembled in such a way that the PC board is only in touch contact with the main drive housing. Sudden temperature changes shrink the components and the small separation between the PC board and the drive breaks some electircal contact. Heating it up gets them back together again.
ReplyDeleteFunny as this story is, apparently if the symptom is a clicking noise at power up, the solution is to FREEZE the thing, to increase the tolerances so that the heads can slip in between the platters!