I am a high school student, and I basically do simple troubleshooting and attempt to fix things when things go wrong. As my experience is based on real problems, my teacher asked me to attempt to fix this hard disk drive that is considered "dead".
I've fixed at least two "dead" hard drives from my teacher's hard drive collection, and I've used SpinRite 6 to fix them with success.
But this particular one is the strangest of them all, as it can not boot, and it generates a continuous series of two beeps, and the program remains in the BIOS.
I checked what the beeping sound meant in the article Computer POST and beep codes.
To my understanding, the hard drive might have a "parity circuit failure" which sound pretty bad. I plugged this hard drive on the other computers and it appears to be the same problem. I am certain that this hard drive is at fault, as I've tested the other computers with working hard drives, and they had no problems.
My next step to fixing this hard drive is apparently SpinRite 6. After I got Spinrite running, and select level to 2 (for recovery) I went to the screen to select the drive and it displays "DOS A: Undetermined Format". I looked at the details and it said that "SpinRite is unable to read sector zero, which is the first sector of this removable drive".
Ignoring the error, I attempted to try SpinRite anyways, but it couldn't start, which now leaves me without any solutions.
Is this hard drive absolutely dead with no solution in fixing it? Or are there some things I've not tried yet?
If it's absolutely dead, I'm going to take it apart : )
Best Answer
Your diagnosis of this hard drive is a bit faulty. Two beeps, and your corresponding page which shows errors, points to a parity bit error in the memory, not the hard drive.
In order for SpinRite to operate on the hard drive, it needs to be recognized in the BIOS. Since you said you can't get past the BIOS screen there is no way for SpinRite to access the drive.
Unless there is some sort of data you need off of these drives, or the two that you 'fixed', I would trash them. Once they start getting errors they are likely to get more and more. So even if they are 'fixed' - by marking bad sectors - there is a good chance they will fail in the near future.
If there is something you need off of them, you could try to replace the controller card on the hard drive, which has worked for me in the past (using a working controller from the exact same model). However, if that doesn't get you anywhere, the drive is likely dead.