Musical Hard Drive

Seriously, I have a musical hard drive. The drive itself is playing a little tune. It's the most bizarre thing I have ever seen... err... heard. Let me explain.

One of the computers at work started acting up, throwing a blue screen and finally showing that wonderful black screen saying that NTLDR was missing or corrupt (I think that was the file, anyway). To get her up and running in a flash, we put a brand new computer under her desk. The computer she was using was about 2.5 years old and wasn't really suited to her work anyway. The drive was still "functional" as far as I could tell so I told her we'd pull it later and try to recover any data she had on it. This was about 2-3 weeks ago. As it turns out, it's lucky that she didn't have anything on the drive she couldn't lose.

I finally had a chance to pull the drive this afternoon. I opened the box and discovered that the drive is SATA (Serial ATA) and not IDE. The external enclosure we use for drive recovery will take either type of drive. I mounted the drive in the enclosure, connected it to my laptop's USB, plugged it in, and turned on the power.

I immediately knew something was not right. Normally, a drive will give a quiet whine as it spins up. I couldn't hear any whining noises. A few seconds later, the drive... the DRIVE... spits out about a dozen notes in this cute, but oh so surprising, ditty that I can now only surmise is a musical death knell. My assistant was nearby and I exclaimed, "What the hell was that? Did you hear that?"

"What's making that noise?" he asked.

"I think it's the drive." And it did it again. "Yes, that's coming from the drive itself. I've never heard a hard drive do that. Have you?"

"No."

"Do you suppose that means it's dead?"

"I don't know. This is a first for me, too."

I tried unplugging everything but the power as well as trying the standard power plug instead of the SATA power plug... same old song and no dance. I'm not quite ready to call it dead but I think that's what it means. I'm going to have to call Maxtor/Seagate support tomorrow and see if they know what it means.