I was in the middle of working on my MacBook Pro the other night when the hard drive began clicking. The entire system froze and I was forced to power off the machine. When I attempted to power it back on it would not boot. I just got more clicking. For two days this was the story. The drive just would not spin up. So I put in a new hard drive thinking that I would probably toss this drive in the trash.
I spoke to several people about it asking for suggestions on how I might get the drive to work. I heard from 2 unrelated sources that keeping the drive very cool might help so I left it in a zip lock bag in the fridge last night. Then I plugged it in to my desktop machine and after a few clicks it freed up the spindle and spun up! Unfortunately Windows does not natively read HFS (the mac file system) but my my brother knew of a great little program called HFS Explorer which allows windows to extract files from an HFS partition while properly handling symlinks. Super cool! I’ll be recovering my data tody after which I don’t think I’ll trust the drive anymore.
Specs on the hard drive:
Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00
2.5 inch
120 GB
5400 RPM
SATA