I just ordered a white label IDE drive on eBay and noticed a sound that I have never heard before. I am wondering if it's normal. Thanks!
Here is what I recorded and uploaded to youtube:
https://youtu.be/AIwrIwBXhHY
I've heared similar things, that's drive is dead ...
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If its not completely dead yet, it is at the very least seriously unhealthy.
Definitely not normal.
I'm not hearing it actually spin up and initialize normally. It seems dead; probably damaged in shipping.
I'd be curious if you can get the BIOS/OS to detect it without hanging, though.
The drive was working but at the time of the video the motherboard wasn't detecting it. I was testing CPU's yesterday, and after my third CPU the motherboard wasn't detecting any of the drives so I thought it was the IDE cable. I tried a bunch of things but it wasn't detecting it anyways so I got tired and just shut the PC down. After 20 mins I came back and tried again. This time the DVD showed up but not the drive. I plugged another IDE drive and it worked so it wasn't the cable at all.
In that case, perhaps it was a loose power connector. Try reinserting the (or trying another) Molex 4-pin power cable to the HDD if the problem resurfaces.
I tried the drive alone in different molex connectors but nothing... I tried another hard drive and it was fine. I think I will return it. Thanks!
Could be "stiction" , head stuck to platters and preventing them from spinning
or worse a seized spindle.
In first case, if you otherwise decided to toss it, I would tap gently from the
border several times - sometimes this could free heads and platters could spin free.
Some call it "percussive maintainance" but I definively not reccomend it if valuable
data are inside. Another option is to warm up the disk with a hair drier or cool it down
since platter and heads are made of different materials they shrink or expand in a
different way and this may unstick them. Be aware that when the heads actually free
they could damage themselves or/and platter surface and this could lead to this
typical scenarios :
1) HD not ID since a system head was damaged and most of firmware could not be loaded.
2) HD IDs but if a non system head was damaged you got regular patterns of "bad sector"
(non actually bad!)
3) HD IDs fine but if there's media damage you got bad sectors in a specific zone of
the disk.
4) You are very lucky and both heads and platters are fine and HD works good as nothing
has happened. (Sometime happens !)
don't bother buying used hdds you never really know their condition. i'd just get a small ssd with an ide/sata adapter
