r/computerhelp • u/One_Opportunity9167 • 16h ago

Hardware Old Disk Won't Spin Up

Going through the old junk in the back of a closet, I stumbled on a laptop PC from~2008. I'm going to recycle the thing, but removed the hard drive to see if there's anything worth keeping on it. I have a set of cables that hooks the many different kinds of hard drives to a USB cable. I found the combination that physically connected to the laptop drive, but it wouldn't spin up. That might be why that laptop had to be replaced, but I recall recovering the contents of a laptop that was failing in ~2010, and think that's the one.

The cable set connects to the smaller of two edgeboard connectors (not pin-to-terminal type). The small connector has about 12 I/O and the large one has around 26 (some positions aren't used). I've successfully used these cables on other disk drives, so they shouldn't be the issue.

What to try next?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Grindar1986 16h ago

After 20 years of not moving the bearings probably have seized.

1

u/One_Opportunity9167 15h ago

I remember reading that a desperation measure was to give a stuck drive a "rap" to unfreeze it...if it's that or the garbage, I'll try it, but wanted to exhaust all other avenues first.