foreverain4 said:
this is not good. i have an external firewire seagate hard drive. when i turn it on, the light on the front comes on, but it doesnt seem like the hard drive even spins up. if i hold the drive, i cant feel any activity on the inside. this drives is not very old, but out of warranty. any ideas? bad power supply maybe?
Yeah, the 12V rail of the power supply would be my first guess. The light on the front is probably driven by the 5V rail, while the drive spindle is always driven by the 12V rail, AFAIK. A failed power supply capacitor, fuse, or voltage regulator seems more likely than stiction (unless you left the drive sitting on a shelf for two or three years). Try plugging the drive into your computer's power supply and see if it spins up. If so, the problem is probably some aspect of the case rather than the drive (though I'd go ahead and back it up immediately just in case it isn't).
Also, depending on how the drive is jumpered internally, it may not spin up until it gets a command from the FW-ATA bridge chipset, in which case it may be the controller board in the case that's shot. You can test this by looking up the actual bare drive (by model number) on Seagate's website, looking at the jumper settings and seeing if there's a spindle delay or spindle autostart jumper and changing the setting of that (those) jumper(s) if needed.
Worst comes to worst, if it won't spin up internally, you can either do the old "freeze the drive" trick or the old "spin the drive violently" trick to break the mechanism free and try to salvage whatever data you can from the drive afterwards. The former is probably safer than the latter, so it is probably worth trying first.
Another dirty trick.... If you find that the drive has lots of bad blocks when you try to recover the data to a new drive...
WITHOUT DELETING the first backup, leave the drive spinning constantly overnight, then try again. Sometimes if a drive fails due to bearing leakage, leaving it spinning for hours will cause the drive platters to sling the bearing grease off the data surface and harmlessly deposit it on the inside of the drive's metal casing.
When this happens, you may find that you are able to access data on parts of the disk where the grease pushed the heads too far away from the platter surface to reliably read the information during the initial backup attempt. I've seen this happen personally. Suddenly, a drive that was failing to read about half the blocks could read all of them. Strangest thing I ever saw. Didn't last long, though. Drive spun down and never spun again.
