Hi guys,

A friend of mine was taking his hard drive over to a friend's place, when he accidently placed it close to a speaker, a sub woofer to be precise. Anyway, he realised his horrible mistake a few minutes later and removed it. When he got home and tried it in his system, the hard drive was not being detected. Is there any way he can salvage this hard drive or is it trashed for good? Its a new 40GB and has data that he would'nt like to lose.

Any input on this would be appreciated. Or if anybody can explain what happens to a hard drive when its placed too close to a huge magnet, like that of a subwoofer.

Thanks
Derrick

The drive itself is probably not defective, unless it suffered from very serious magnetism which wrecked pieces of the hardware like chips. In that case, see if you get your pc to find the drive anyway and flash it with the manufacterors software.

Data on the driver however could very likely be gone, and there is very poor change you ar going to get it back, unless you are willing to pay some serious money.
There are companies that van retrieve data from demagnetized, formatted and physically damaged drives. But again this will really cost you...

Originally posted by merlin_the_magician
....... In that case, see if you get your pc to find the drive anyway and flash it with the manufacterors software....

And how would you propose that? Through magic?

If you removed a drive that was working and placed it on a subwoofer and it no longer works, then it's probably time to conjure up another hard drive.
Firmware ain't going to help.

Magnets corrupt data and hard drives. Its that simple.

Originally posted by insomniac
Magnets corrupt data and hard drives. Its that simple.

I'm not 100% sure on that one i reckon the data's gone on the drive, but the drive is most likely reusable. Put it in your computer after you've set the jumpers correctly on the back and see if you can detect it in the BIOS. If not it's a dud :( if you can then you can try recovery software to get stuff back or just format it and start from scratch.

Maybe, but if we read the post, it says "When he got home and tried it in his system, the hard drive was not being detected." Playing around with jumpers wont do anything.

I didnt see if he specified if this was a slave or master, Of course the magnet could have messed up his os, and if being a master with no operating system it wont boot, so maybe connecting it back to his friends as a slave it might see it, if not...then yes, magic would be the next option.

If this is really a new drive then it should still be under warranty. Accept the fact that the data is gone and just get the drive replaced.

Probably not a good more to tell them what happened...

I seriously doubt that a magnet destroyed the drive. First off, just for arguments sake, if the data was actually erased by the magnet, the drive still would have been detected by the BIOS. The problem you would see is no data being on the drive. It has to be a hardware issue in which case, a speaker magnet would not have damaged it.

Make sure you didn't yank the cable loose from the motherboard when replacing the drive.

Hey guys,

Thanks for all the input. My friend called me last night to say the drive is working. I dont know whether he connected it wrong the first time (after placing it near the magnet)...and got all excited and paranoid when it wasn't being picked up. I guess he was just being paranoid.

He says the drive still works fine AND his data is all still there. It works as it always did.

Thanks for the interesting input anyway.

Derrick