CompuServe Messages

I'm not discarding the possibility of a physical problem, but I still think there is a good chance it's just weird data recorded in important tracks. One of the sides of the disk, inaccessible to the user, has all drive information, sector positioning, etc. If that goes bad, specially pointing a sector to some place outside the disk space, the behavior is a loud knocking, rattling noise. That's the sound of the head assembly trying to stick its face outside of the disk case. Yes, the SCSI controller will not be able to access the disk using "normal" methods as the information it gets back from the disk is all screwed up (the information the disk itself tried to get from the bad sector). To fix this it is necessary to reprogram the disk. Sending back to the manufacture should suffice. Sometimes, it is even possible to fix by simply reprogramming the disk to reformat itself (you can do that if you get the tools I was talking about). The bottom line question is: do you need the data you have there? If not, it's probably cheaper, time wise, to just dump it. Anything longer than 3 hours to fix will more likely be more expensive than buying a new disk…