Hard Drives and static :(

[Shmee150]

Hi,

Some of you may have known about my hard drive problem a few weeks ago, well that solved itself pretty much as best it could have done but...

Yesterday I moved into my uni hall, set up my desktop and started plugging it in and then booted it up. I got to the speaker cable touched it on the back of the case and got a nasty shock from it and my computer went off with a lovely woosh noise. So I immediately was like oh f*ck and this is where I've got to:

The computer had 3 hard drives in it and these are the results of tests on each one:

The boot drive seems barely functioning, reports many bad segments and when booted on eventually everything runs exceptionally slowly and lots of error messages appear. Through a USB drive it is also very weak in a similar way with browsing files etc...

Drive 2 seems to be absolutely fine. Works perfectly in a USB caddy and also as a slave drive in the computer when booted on a seperate working hard drive.

Drive 3 seems completely kaputch and doesn't respond to anything, it is spinning up but doesn't show in Computer Management or My Computer or anything.

So the 2 dead drives are a 500gig and 750gig set, not gonna be cheap to replace, needless to say I'd rather be able to pull the data off them although it's not compulsory. Does anybody know what may be the problem, possible things I ought to try or not try and maybe if there's any way to get anything back to life.

Thanks,

Tim

[CrazyMonkey]

Have you tried putting the drives in an anti-static bag (the one it comes in) then inside a tesco sandwich bag and then inside another, Seal both sandwich bags seperately (squeeze the air out). Pop them in the freezer overnight.

It will take a while as the internal components need to be stone cold. Once are really chilly (inside not outside) take them out connect them up and attempt to boot. Its also a good idea to have a fan blowing over the PCB on the bottom as condensation could just do more damage.
It's allowed people to boot dead drives and copy files over.

However to get the dead drives fully functioning and back to 100% health is beyond the power of superman.

Regarding the USB issue, sounds like something on the motherboard was damaged.

As a side note, are the drives still in waranty most drives have a very long warranty period.

[speardane]

ouch...

I'm not sure I follow the detail of what happened. I ask because it sounds like there may be other problems?

I would expect the case to be earthed - if it wasn't - you've just had an expensive demo of why it should have been!
If there is an earth problem in the mains supply, rather than computer - get the hall manager to get it fixed urgently (and ask for a contribution if you are feeling cheeky)

you can get led mains testers fairly cheap at a lot of DIY stores

I also would have expected the speaker cable to be low voltage (unless we are talking about valves. Is there a short from one of the big capacitors in the amplifier PSU?

You can either go down the route of fairly expensive windows based tools like partition and drive magic (these are good, but I got annoyed at having to re-purchase them with each new version of windows) or find out about using one of the Linux "live disk" recovery tools.

"live disk" means OS runs directly from CD/DVD, doesn't install itself. Free - but more time!

I found it has not only an ok GUI but some of the low level routines are valuably less clever eg DD which does a block by block copy - even if the file system is completely B^%&d. Neat to do a back up before playing

Also sounds like your first disk has a very short life left. I would back it up asap...

[Shmee150]

So it would apear after excessive testing that all that is actually dead is the mobo. On another note I managed to drop one of the hard drives rendering it fairly useless, well on that it works and I've been able to pull most of the data off it via a USB caddy but it's kinda misbehaving and leaving out files in copying. If I reformat should it recover this as it's presumably just a few dodgy sectors?

As to what's going on well it's all a bit beyond me. I'm going to leave it for the immediate future and wait until I can afford a new desktop and go from there (bought a laptop yesterday woo).

[peterb]

Were the speakers mains powered? Without actually being there, it could be that there was a fault on the powersupply, coupled with some iffy earthing, and the mobo was earthed through the speaker leads, causing all sorts of wierd things. It doesn't sound as if it was static, more a power short somewhere.

Ads for the drive, if it has been dropped it has probably suffered irreparable mechanical damage. While they are reasonably robust, dropping from hand height onto a hard floor does stand a good chance of killing them. A reformat is worth trying, but I wouldn't hold out much hope.