BleepingComputer.com: Hard Drive Won't Work - I Can Hear It Struggling To Spin

Hi,
I have an 80GB Seagate Barracuda drive that has been in an external enclosure for the last year. Then it stopped working. I can remember the exact moment:

Windows XP was booting (Bootscreen with the three blue scrolling squares), and I could hear it humming like it always does. Then I turned the drive off for no apparent reason. When I turned it back on when XP was finished loading, Windows wouldn't detect it. I turned it off and on again. Still no go. I let it sit unplugged for ten minutes, then tried again. Windows gave me a blue screen (I'm so stupid, I didn't record the stop code).

I did some research, then decided that I would put it in the freezer for an hour, then I took it out, and tried plugging it into my laptop (Which is MUCH quieter than my desktop, so I could hear what it was doing). When I plug it in, I can hear the platters struggling to spin. It makes the same noise that a cat makes when it is sniffing right in your ear. Like something is quickly moving back and fourth.

What's wrong with it? This just suddenly happened out of the blue, the drive has been sitting in the same spot for the last three months.

Well they can and do go bad at a moments notice. With a USB hard drive, I tend to suspect the enclosure more than the drive. Can you slave it in your desktop and see what happens?
The freezer trick is the last ditch fix before deep-sixing the drive

garmanma, on Jun 8 2008, 05:57 AM, said:

I put it in my PC as a slave, and it started smoking and smelled like melting metal. It's dunzo.

JamieH, on Jun 8 2008, 11:36 AM, said:

Not usually a good sign Melting metal that is...It's toast...Sorry about your luck...