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I know someone who had that happen to a server he was directly responsible for (well, someone unplugged it anyway, might well have been someone else in the office - it wasn't exactly a proper server room)

It was not just that the server crashed, but the ventilation proved to be bad enough that one of the SCSI drives (which should have been in a RAID, but wasn't...) wouldn't start.

They ended up opening it to try to kickstart it manually (been there, done that myself; had a drive survive 6 months with me "helping" the motor spin it up every morning; yes I backed everything up very regularly during that period), finding the drive head had gotten stuck to whatever material covered the plate. They ended up putting the drive in an oven while connected, and heat it until it spun up, and which point they dumped what data they could.



I do have a memory of having to bump an old heavy drive to get it to start spinning. :-)


I opened mine up, so I'd start rotating the platter by using my finger to start spinning the centre.

Of course this was with a 20MB hard drive - the sensitivity to everything from dust to alignment changes was magnitudes different from the internals of modern drives...




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