Saturday, August 2, 2014

hardware failure - Hard Drive Clicking, But Not Dead

I have in my possession a Supermicro X7DBE which I acquired from a friend a couple years ago and had operating until this year. After I went back to school in August, I was forced to put it into storage. It's been 8 months since it's been in use, and I'm having an issue returning it to operation.


To return it to function, I first installed the same hard drive I used with it before its decommission, a Seagate Barracuda 1TB that's around 3 years old. After booting the Supermicro copmuter, the hard drive started making a clicking noise and the hard drive became available only intermittently. The clicking sound seemed like the drive was repeatedly spinning up then shutting down immediately. I assumed the worst: that the hard drive was dead. However, when I popped it into my desktop computer to verify my assumption, lo' and behold, it worked perfectly: no clicking, no intermittent connection.


If it wasn't the hard drive, I thought, perhaps it was an ATA controller (Southbridge) problem. I found another spare hard drive, a Western Digital generic 80GB that's over 10 years old. If it were the southbridge, I'd have similar issues when using that drive, but that was not the case. The drive performed fine in the offending computer, as old as it is.


So, the Seagate 1TB hard drive functions normally, but does not in the Supermicro computer. I went through the BIOS and ensured that no settings would get in the way. I even reset the BIOS settings back to factory, with which the same drive had functioned under before. What could be the issue? What other information might be relevant for diagnosing this issue?


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