Reviving a stuck hard drive
I thought stiction was a thing of the past, until I recently tried to power up an old laptop computer I hadn't powered up for five years. I could tell that the hard drive in the laptop was not spinning. I had nothing to lose, so I tried my old trick of getting drives unstuck - by vigorously twisting (shaking in an angular kind of way) the whole laptop computer. You can shake a removed hard drive much better than a whole computer, but shaking of the computer was enough with in this case. For PC's, its best to remove the hard drive. Grab the hard drive as shown, then vigorously shake it back and forth. The shaking should be a twisting motion rather than a back and forth. The twisting should be such that the laptop hard drive stays in its plane. Imagine if it were lying flat on a table - turning it back and forth while still on the table - that sort of motion, but not on the table. If you aren't confident, you might want to do this over a couch or a bed, just in case it slips from your hands. It should only take a few shakes back and forth to get it unstuck. Only do this to hard drives that won't spin up. You can always hear a bit of a whine, and a bit of vibration out of a drive that is spinning, but if you don't hear that, then its not spinning, and you might want to try this.
Finally, stiction only happens if the hard drive has NOT been used for at least
a day. So if the hard drive spontaneously won't spin anymore, its something else.
Reflowing the solder
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