> I have an old external harddisk, Toshiba 320 Gb, with a USB connector that > I wanted to check for contents. It did not start up when connected and I > could not hear the motor spinning. After leaving it in the freezer > overnight the motor spins but it is not recognized by my computer. I > disassembled it and could see that the head assembly rests outside the > disk but when it is powered on, the head first moves to the center of the > disk, then to the periphery and finally back to the resting position. This > happens every few seconds and leaving it connected overnight changed > nothing. > > I installed smartmontools but the disk is not even recognized by my system > as a /dev/sd* device and therefore not accessible to smartd (at least as > far as I know it.) Usually such devices had an ide or sata port and the USB connection was made with an interface module. Maybe you can connect the device directly with an ide or sata adapter and see if it shows up there. It's also quite normal that a drive doesn't spin up after being powered of for a long time. Moving the drive around in your hand so that the disks can turn inside can help to make them going. Regards, Simon