A friend gave me his hard drive to see if I could get the data off it. Well, I tried a lot of things and none worked. So I decided to just open it up and look inside. So I hooked it up to my PC and tried to boot. I watched the drive and saw that the arm moves back and forth only a few times (very slowly I might add) then just stops altogether. Everything is still spinning, the arm just doesn't move. Is there anything I can do to get this working just once to back it up?

HDDs must be opened in a "clean room" to protect it from contamination. Now that you've broken the seal & exposed it to "dirty air", you may as well just toss it in the garbage... ASUS A7N8X-X Athlon XP 1800+ 8.5 x 200MHz 1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7 Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB WinME/WinXP Pro SP1

I agree with jam. Computer components are generally meant to be torn apart and rebuild like a transmission on a car. There are many controls in effect when hard drives are manufactored.. they are made in static, humidity, temperature and dust free environments. there are alot of touchy little parts in a hard drive. they aren't user rebuildable . it your friend has valuable data on this HD then they can take it to a data recovery company. some data recovery companys have been aboe to retrieve data off a burnt computer as in a house fire. This process can be very costly tho.

I agree with jam. Computer components are generally meant to be torn apart Typo! sorry i meant not meant to be torn apart.

It could also be that the heads moved long enough to read what was there and completed the read. Try going for the data now before that contamination jams the head. Bryan

No, that won't be necessary. :P He was just wondering if there was a chance that I could recover anything. Also, I had no idea about opening them in a "clean room", lol. Oh well, nothing else worked before that so I was just trying anything I could. We'll just toss it out. Thanks anyway guys.

"No, that won't be necessary. :P" I meant that for what ccfrank said about the recovery.