[Fascia]

Pulling my Fuel out of storage and where it used to work, I can't seem to get a hard drive working on it.

I have several 80-pin drives and several 68->80 pin converters. While the drive+adapter already in the case was working, no combination of drive or converter seems to result in the disc spinning. I tried plugging it in to the same power line as the DVD drive, which works fine, but still no spinning.

My first suspicion was the darned special SCSI cable. An inspection shows a number of dings to the plastic casing, but I don't see any exposed or broken lines. Would a damaged cable even result in the drive not spinning?

[Irinikus]

It may be suffering from "striction" (the platters ceased). A steady knock on it's side on a flat surface may free the platters to spin freely.

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Hard disk drives
In the context of hard disk drives, stiction refers to the tendency of read/write heads to stick to the platters. Stiction is a result of smoothness and is exacerbated by humidity and other liquids condensing at the head-disk interface. Once the heads have stuck to the platters, the disk can be prevented from spinning up and can cause physical damage to the media and the slider. Other forces considered as responsible for stiction include electrostatic forces.[citation needed]

In the early models of hard disk drives, stiction was known to cause read/write heads to stick to the platters of the hard drive due to the breakdown of lubricants used to coat the platters. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the size of hard drive platters decreased from the older 8" and 5.25" sizes to 3.5" and smaller, manufacturers continued to use the same calendering processes and lubricants used on the older, larger drives. The much tighter space caused much higher internal operating temperatures in these newer smaller drives, often leading to an accelerated breakdown of the surface lubricants into their much stickier components. When the drive was powered off and would cool down (for example at the end of the day when a user went home and shut off their PC), these now-broken-down lubricants would become quite viscous and sticky, sometimes causing the read/write heads to literally stick to the platter. One response to this problem was to remove the affected drive and strike it gently but firmly on the side, then try to start it while connected to but not necessarily fitted inside the machine. This might break the heads free for long enough to spin up the drive and recover the data from it without powering it down. Once started, it would continue to run indefinitely, but might not start again if powered down. Instead of tapping the drive, rotating it sharply by hand could start it. In most Maxtor hard drives, if the heads are stuck to the platters, the drive might make "music" from either the heads trying to move or from the platters trying to spin up.

Modern hard drives have mostly solved the stiction problem by using ramps to "unload" the heads from the disk surface on power-down. These ramps ensure the heads are not touching the platters, which not only prevents stiction but also keeps abrasion from kicking up microscopic particulates that can later contaminate the drive mechanism. Parking the heads in this manner also allows the voice coil actuator to be shut down to save power, so the heads are also frequently unloaded when the drive is idle. A competing solution is based on laser textured landing zones near the ID of the platter where no data are stored. The heads are parked in that zone, and the actuator is latched until the next start-up. The landing zone consists of a controlled array of nanometer-level 'bumps' on the disk surface produced during manufacturing of the disk using a local substrate melting process employing suitable laser-based equipment. The method was pioneered by IBM around 1995 and is still widely in use in most desktop and server class HDDs.[4]

[Fascia]

Doesn't seem to help. Also still the same problem with different discs. None of the discs are showing in hinv either.

[Irinikus]

If the drive is getting power, it should at least spin up.

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Check the power supply to the drives

[Fascia]

Hmm, I am using the ATX adapter, but I bought Sparkle's PC version of the Fuel power supply to avoid any issues. I guess I'll break out the multimeter.

[Fascia]

Actually, after fussing around with combinations, it looks like it's the SCSI cable to blame. Unplugged, the disc spins up. Plug in the SCSI cable, the drive never comes to life.