wiredcanyon94 said:Alright, let’s try this again. Hard drives don't have needles. Record players have needles. Drives have heads.
https://hhr.wiki/detial/Disk_read-and-write_head
Are you kidding me right now? 😲 Seriously? If you want my opinion, it seems to me that the only thing on this entire thread actually possessing a head is the disk itself.🤣
If you are going to offer advice to anyone, then focus on the actual problem, man—that is the whole point. These pedantic linguistic debates are completely useless.
Jack Cook7 said:Look, I’ve spent my life playing digital paramedic for thousands of drives—everything from old-school MFM/RLL/ESDI setups and SSDs to those ancient 5.25" and 3.5" floppies, ZIP drives, MO disks, CDs, and DVDs. Some of them were straight-up zombies: motors wouldn't spin, the electronics were fried, or even if you managed to get a utility to talk to the drive, it just screamed about endless errors. Honestly, you start hearing a whole story once you open one up.
The thing is, based on what you're saying, we honestly can't tell where the actual breakdown is happening.
(1) You might have physical damage on the magnetic media itself. A typical Seagate might have anywhere from 1 to 5 platters, both sides used. Usually, they're all functional, but some drives use specific sides strictly for servo data or keeping track of bad sectors.
(2) It could be a busted read head (or heads). Your average drive usually has two heads per platter, though some beefier ones pack more in to crank up those read speeds.
(3) Or the electronics are shot—could be the controller, the motor driver, or just the communication line back to the motherboard.
Usually, issues (1), (2), and (3) show up as these "phantom errors." They pop up sporadically, acting like things are fine one second and then failing the next, and they almost always get worse over time.
(4) Then there’s data corruption in the cache—think battery-backed cache or flash cache. This usually happens after a sudden power loss, a dead battery, or a glitchy flash module. That cache (and the electronic failure behind it) could be sitting on the drive's own controller or on the computer's disk controller.
(5) Or it's software-side file system corruption. Think an OS crash where files don't close properly and get stuck mid-transaction, or maybe the drive head just dumps random junk onto the platters during a hard shutdown. The absolute nightmare scenario is when the FAT (DOS) or the MFT (NTFS) gets trashed and you haven't got a backup ready (unless you're on NTFS 5.0+).
Bottom line? To actually fix this without wasting time, you’ve gotta pinpoint exactly what’s broken first. It could even be a combo of several things.
There’s no magic bullet tool for this.
This conversation is utterly pointless.
A needle fell onto the disk and created a scratch. Every single time the needle hits that scratch, Windows boots up—otherwise, the needle returns, logically bouncing back 3 or 4 times before finally failing to read the loadup, resulting in a read error. If it were the magnetic head failing or a dead sector, Windows would never boot at all from the initial problem. But judging by the author's experience, it actually does work sometimes.
Hypothetically, the solution is to put the disk into a USB enclosure (ideally one with dual power supplies), and during the Seagate loadup, gently tap or sharply nudge the USB enclosure from the left or right side while it sits on the desk so that the needle skips over that scratch during the loading process. If it doesn't work the first time, keep repeating the motion until it succeeds. If it works, that will likely be the absolute last chance to get the disk to spin up and save any data.
I am referring to the author mentioning hearing noise from inside the disk; while it's true the sound could be coming from the power supply, if that were the case, a read error wouldn't occur.
I personally saved data from a Seagate this way using an identical set of symptoms. And yes, it can be done—not necessarily all the data, but maybe 95% of it. I eventually physically opened that drive, and there was a scratch running across the entire platter. A scratch exactly like the kind a needle would make.
Using an enclosure will also bypass any potential COM issues, but if there is anything critical on that disk, professional help is recommended. Furthermore, regarding the enclosure, the half-amp provided by standard USB ports is often insufficient for certain 2.5" drives to spin up, so you really need to pay attention to the label on the Seagate itself. Though, from the start, it is best to look for an enclosure with dual power supplies for tasks like this.