I JUST changed the thermal paste. I didn't touch the drive. It doesn't show up in the explorer but it does under disk management (which takes minutes to start up just like how Windows itself takes 2x to start up if I leave the drive in question plugged in) but it's not initialized (first thing disk management asks me to do which i promptly dismiss) and all the space (shows up as the correct size at least) is unallocated. I tried connecting it to a SATA to USB adapter and nothing changes aside from disk management not even recognizing the hdd capacity anymore (I'm about to dig up the one I use for 3.5" drives just in case)
EaseUS' Partition Manager freezes with the drive installed while Disk Drill is still searching for lost partitions after 20 mins and it's marking every single block as bad (it's still climbing right now)

What the fuck happened? It was working perfectly fine before.

Edit: got the other adapter out, same behavior. Disk Drill doesn't even see the drive anymore if it's connected via an adapter.
Edit 2: nevermind, it doesn't even spin up if I use an adapter (even powered ones)

 

Last edited: Mar 18, 2026 at 4:09 PM

My condolences, @Xeraser, what a hassle!

The more realistic scenario is that the drive was already on the verge of failure, and physical handling finally finished it off. The fact that all software tools malfunction only with this one hard drive strongly suggests a hardware problem. Buy a new hard drive!

 

It was completely fine though, that's the thing. I even made sure to wait for the heads to get parked before I flipped over the laptop and disassembled it. I didn't touch a single thing around the HDD area, let alone the drive itself.

Also nevermind, forget what I said about the adapters: it doesn't even spin up when I use an adapter.

 

it works. i threatened it with violence (lightly banged it against the table when unplugged) and now it works.

 

Wow great! But I would make a backup if not already done. And what do the smart values say?

 

"Good enough"?

 

Weird, you would expect something in the spin retry count, but seems perfect. Maybe just a bad contact. No not bad Kontakt ;-)

 

sometimes HDDs don't like being spun upside down,
smart looks fine, but observe it for few days - if you see DMA/CRC errors, then SATA cable got damaged

 

SMART looks perfectly fine. Better than some of my HDDs.

It was probably just a bad contact with the cable. You probably accidentally moved the cable or the disk. Have you tried cleaning the contacts with contact spray or isopropyl alcohol? That's always a good thing to do.

Stuck head can happen only if it wasn't used for a good while, and yeah - "threatening it with violence" can help then.

 

SOMEHOW the drive is read-only now.
What?

 

@Xeraser, maybe this video will help you!

2025 Fix- Disk Read-Only Problem, Change Read-Only to Read-Write Drive

 

Yeah I did that first thing and it worked, not sure why it even happened.