A while back I was given a laptop to repair. It seemed that the laptop had been dropped and the hard drive had died. A quick eBay later, it had a replacement drive and all was well.

So, a few days ago I got bored, dug the dead drive out and opened it up to see what state it was in. It seems that when the laptop was dropped the drive detected the fall, parked the read/write heads and shut down. But, when the laptop actually hit the floor the arm was pushed beyond its lower limit meaning when the drive was powered up again the arm couldn't move back onto the disk. Seeing as the drive was dead and there was nothing to lose I moved the arm back to its normal parked position on the disk, put all the casing back together and powered it up. It worked.

The drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.5 160GB. I've checked it with CHKDSK and it's found no bad sectors and all the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools I have say the drive is in perfect condition. Do you think it would be worth me keeping the drive and using it day to day? Has anyone been in a similar situation who can comment on post-repair reliability? I'm tempted to buy a portable enclosure off eBay so I can use it as a portable hard drive. If it's likely to fail again though I won't bother.

Thoughts?

(02/09/2010 01:18 PM)PSPkiller Wrote:  A while back I was given a laptop to repair. It seemed that the laptop had been dropped and the hard drive had died. A quick eBay later, it had a replacement drive and all was well.

So, a few days ago I got bored, dug the dead drive out and opened it up to see what state it was in. It seems that when the laptop was dropped the drive detected the fall, parked the read/write heads and shut down. But, when the laptop actually hit the floor the arm was pushed beyond its lower limit meaning when the drive was powered up again the arm couldn't move back onto the disk. Seeing as the drive was dead and there was nothing to lose I moved the arm back to its normal parked position on the disk, put all the casing back together and powered it up. It worked.

The drive is a Seagate Momentus 5400.5 160GB. I've checked it with CHKDSK and it's found no bad sectors and all the S.M.A.R.T. monitoring tools I have say the drive is in perfect condition. Do you think it would be worth me keeping the drive and using it day to day? Has anyone been in a similar situation who can comment on post-repair reliability? I'm tempted to buy a portable enclosure off eBay so I can use it as a portable hard drive. If it's likely to fail again though I won't bother.

Thoughts?

IDE or SATA?

if its a SATA i'd buy it for my PS3

SATA

(02/09/2010 01:47 PM)PSPkiller Wrote:  SATA

price? D:

and pics D:

(02/09/2010 01:50 PM)ProperBritish Wrote:  

(02/09/2010 01:47 PM)PSPkiller Wrote:  SATA

price? D:

and pics D:

'bout £35

Pics:




Why? You thinking of buying or something?

(02/09/2010 02:02 PM)PSPkiller Wrote:  

(02/09/2010 01:50 PM)ProperBritish Wrote:  

(02/09/2010 01:47 PM)PSPkiller Wrote:  SATA

price? D:

and pics D:

'bout £35

Pics:




Why? You thinking of buying or something?

2.5"?

yeah i might when i get paid lol

Yeah it's 2.5". Anything else you want? I'll have a dig through my parts box.

what you got? lol

Just noticed in a post further up about you wanting to buy. Shows how awake I am. Yeah, you can buy by all means.

(02/09/2010 02:33 PM)squee666 Wrote:  £35 for a 2.5inch sata wow that's steep

I just posted what I saw on eBay for used ones. I'll drop a bit if you want.

As for other bits:

• 15.4" laptop LCD
  
• Slimline IDE DVDRW drive
  
• 2x 256MB DDR2 laptop RAM
  
• Mini PCI WiFi card
  
• Iternal laptop modem
  
• 1.8" 30GB (iPod style) Toshiba hard drive in unkown condition
  
• Most of a PSP-1000
  
• Portable USB mouse
  
• Black Dell PS/2 keyboard
  
• Black Dell 17" CRT Monitor
  
• Ancient ATI Rage Pro AGP graphics card
  
• Slot A Pentium 2 200MHz CPU
  
• Slot A Celeron 333MHz CPU
  
• Fucktons of SDRAM in various capacities
  
• Various 3.5" IDE hard drives ranging from 80GB to 2GB
  
• Various motherboards + CPU's
  
• 5.25" IDE CD-ROM drive
  
• 5.25" IDE DVD-ROM drive
  
• Ancient ESS Audiodrive ISA Sound card
  
• Various case and CPU fans
  
• Barebones Dell Dimension 2400 with CPU and RAM (no HDD)
  
• Single Wharfedale CRS3 Hifi speaker
  
• Sony CMT-GS30 DAB Hifi with Acoustic Solutions AV20 speakers
  
• Custom built Pentium 4 2.5GHz, 512MB RAM, 60GB HDD, in windowed "ricer" case (can be broken down if you only want bits)
  
• DVI VGA adapter
  
• And a load of other junk
  

Basically the contents of my cupboard. Everything on the list works (except for maybe the iPod hard drive; I've got no way of testing it.) If there's anything in particular you need I can either look for it or ask around for it. I know a few people who deal in bits and pieces like this.