Sad day today. I tried to load a Ghost CD which had a small crack near the center hole in my main computer just to see if it was still readable. Drive gets up to full speed and CD shatters, sounding like a firecracker. I try to eject it, and it's now in a million tiny pieces which are wedged in the internals. I go down to the floor to try the force eject hole, and at some point, I look up to notice a Windows XP bluescreen. Force eject doesn't cut it, so I shut the machine off to get the possibly ruined DVD drive out.
After cleaning out the optical drive, I get everything back together and am getting "please insert..." errors like there's no HD. I've now tried a bunch of stuff and the drive definitely is not only unreadable, but is no longer even detected by two different computer's post sequences. After it spins up, if you're close enough, you can hear a really light knocking sound for a few seconds like the heads are trying to free themselves.
The questions- If there was a head crash,etc. leading to a mechanical issue, would the drive not even report itself to the computer like that? Or, if the drive's controller circuitry got zapped, causing it to not identify itself like that, could this cause repetitive nonsense mechanical movement like I'm hearing? I'm hoping it's the latter, and I have ordered a new duplicate drive which should be here in a few days. I plan to try swapping the controller board first. I know you're not supposed to do this, but if it stays the same, I may resort to going in it to see if I can tap something back into place.
Sorry for all the text and much thanks for any advice.
After cleaning out the optical drive, I get everything back together and am getting "please insert..." errors like there's no HD. I've now tried a bunch of stuff and the drive definitely is not only unreadable, but is no longer even detected by two different computer's post sequences. After it spins up, if you're close enough, you can hear a really light knocking sound for a few seconds like the heads are trying to free themselves.
The questions- If there was a head crash,etc. leading to a mechanical issue, would the drive not even report itself to the computer like that? Or, if the drive's controller circuitry got zapped, causing it to not identify itself like that, could this cause repetitive nonsense mechanical movement like I'm hearing? I'm hoping it's the latter, and I have ordered a new duplicate drive which should be here in a few days. I plan to try swapping the controller board first. I know you're not supposed to do this, but if it stays the same, I may resort to going in it to see if I can tap something back into place.
Sorry for all the text and much thanks for any advice.