Hard Drive Has Gone Musical

[dealmaster00]

So, one of my hard drives at work has turned musical. I tried powering up this embedded system that has a sata hd connected to it; the whole system worked fine a week ago. I immediately hear this "boo duh dee boo duh dee boo duh dee" 3 tone musical arpeggio (minor third and perfect fourth) start to play.

I quickly turn off embedded system and am thinking, "This is odd, haven't heard this noise before". After turning on and off a few more times verify that the behavior is persistent, and is coming from the hard drive. On the very last note the hard drive (Maxtor 250GB mechanical) vibrates violently, and then goes silent. It also happens when you just apply power to the hard drive. It is no longer recognized by anything as well. I've seen hard drives fail but never in this manner before!

 

[exdeath]

The voice coil servo actuator in a HDD is not unlike the voice coil of a speaker. It's not unusual to hear audiable frequency "beeps" and "blips" and "buzzing" from a HDD. On power on it goes into a repeating loops where it sweeps the heads over the disk hundreds and thousands of times trying to orient and calibrate itself and find feedback info embedded on the disk and not seeing anything, and then the MCU shuts down and halts the drive when it times out and fails.