The drive "cannot be recognised at all by the computer (BIOS does not see it)", and the department's computing officers established the important part: "the drive would not even spin". Those two observations are one observation. A drive that does not turn cannot read, and a drive that cannot read has nothing to say to a BIOS. So there is no point looking at cables, controllers or settings; the fault is upstream of all of it. Two candidates remain. Either power is not reaching the mechanism properly — a board fault, most often in the power section — or the mechanism is not free to turn, which means a seized motor or heads resting where they should not be.
| Media | A hard drive that the BIOS does not see at all and which does not spin when powered, checked first by a department's own computing officers. |
| Reported situation | Hard drive · not recognised at all, absent from the BIOS · computing officers confirmed it does not even spin · email contact preferred · recovery sought. |
| Fault class | Motor or board fault — either the board is not delivering power correctly, or the mechanism cannot turn because the motor has seized or the heads are resting on the surface. Data intact on the platters; the work is to restore rotation safely and read once. |
| Equipment used | Profiled on a current-limited bench supply, power draw and any attempt at spin-up measured, the board checked under stereo magnification · a board fault addressed with a matched donor board carrying this drive's own ROM; otherwise, under laminar flow, a seized motor addressed or resting heads freed and matched donor heads fitted · copied to an image on DeepSpar, PC-3000 UDMA underneath and the data validated. Findings reported by email at each stage. |
A BIOS reports what answers it. It sends an identify command down the bus and waits, and if nothing replies it lists nothing — no size, no model, no entry at all. That is why 'the BIOS cannot see it' is such an unhelpful symptom in isolation: it describes silence, and silence has many possible authors. Knowing that the drive does not spin removes almost all of them at a stroke.
Rotation is the precondition for everything else. The heads fly on a cushion of air generated by the platters turning; with no rotation there is no cushion, the heads cannot be safely loaded, nothing can be read, and the drive has nothing to identify itself with. So the question is simply why it is not turning, and there are two families of answer. Either the board is not delivering what the motor needs — a failed power section, a shorted protection component, damaged traces — or the mechanical assembly cannot turn, because the spindle bearing has seized or the heads have come to rest on the platter and are holding it.
Those two paths diverge sharply and are worth separating before anything is attempted. Measuring the current draw on a controlled supply distinguishes them fairly quickly: a board that is not supplying anything looks quite different from a motor straining against a seizure. It matters because a resting head stack must be dealt with under laminar flow before the drive is ever asked to turn again — forcing rotation with heads down is one of the reliable ways to convert a recoverable drive into a scrapped one.
It went onto a current-limited bench supply where the power draw and any attempt at rotation could be measured rather than guessed at, and the board went under a stereo microscope at the same time. That separated the two possibilities cleanly. The fault was addressed on its own terms — the board approach where the power path had failed, clean-air work under laminar flow where the mechanism was the problem — and the drive was then imaged using DeepSpar over a PC-3000 UDMA with the data validated. Everything was reported by email, as asked.
Rotation restored safely, the drive imaged and the data put onto fresh media, with the whole exchange conducted in writing. The diagnostic cost nothing; the figure that followed was fixed, written and inclusive of VAT. This is physical work by definition, so 50% of the quote was payable in advance against parts and bench time with the balance falling due only on a proven recovery. A dead drive that has never been forced is a considerably better prospect than one somebody has kept trying to start, and this one had been left alone.
Once you have established that it does not turn, stop applying power to it. There is nothing further to learn from another attempt, and there is a real risk in one: if the heads have come to rest on the platter, forcing the motor to turn drags them across the surface your data is recorded on. Do not tap it, do not put it in the freezer, and do not try the trick of spinning it by hand, whatever the internet says. Do check the obvious external things once — a different power lead on a desktop unit, a different port — and then leave it alone. The fault is either in the power path or in the mechanism, and both are bench work with the case open under laminar flow.
Every case file here is written up from a real enquiry handled for households and businesses across Norwich and Norfolk, anonymised so that nobody is identifiable. Each sets out the reasoning behind the diagnosis and the method used on that particular fault, with the equipment named.
Intermittent is not lucky, it is a countdown — and the silence at the end of it is the motor or the heads
Two noises, two facts: the whir says the motor is fine, the click says the heads are not
Spinning is not the same as ready — a drive with damaged structures never gets as far as introducing itself
Diagnosis costs nothing and takes up to 2 working days from arrival, the quote is fixed in writing, and logical work runs no fix, no fee — start online or ring the freephone.