560 that sounds like a Police Car!

[xenos]

I've been working on IBM ThinkPads for some time now. I've started on the 560 series and worked my way up through the T40 series.

Some one recently dropped a 560 (2640) in my lap. It was apparently locked away and forgoten about in a cabinet. It starts but doesn't make it through POST.

The strange thing is that is makes a warning sound like a police siren! I've never heard a ThinkPad do that. I'm used to the usual beeps, but never an Alarm? It's actually pretty funny.

Anyone ever experience this type of sound before??

[bigtiger]

That is funny. Do you care to record it and share with us?

[xenos]

That's not a bad idea. I might do that.

[Rick Aguinaldo]

I was amused when I heard the wailing sound . It comes from the hdd. Twice I came across the phenomenon. My guess is that the drive head mechanism is seized somehow, triggering an audible alarm built inside the drive. I managed to resolve it with partial success by the "knock/bang-it" method (silly me).

Encouraged by the success of the first instance, i did it again with the second drive and yes the siren went off but with resulting bad sectors which kept propagating with time. I do not recommend this to anyone. It is against the manufacturer's instructions to not subject those drives to G-shocks else an inevitable damage to the platters' surface. I did it only on those two paper weight candidates. A suggestion from my pc tech brother came too late. He reckons freezing/thawing the hd, perhaps a less destructive method, might do the trick. The thermal contraction/expansion of its internals might free the stuck mechanism.

[tom_k]

Anyone ever experience this type of sound before??

Yes , i have 3 ones ! :) , 2 are definitely pw protected
3rd is "dead" so i don`t know .
I´m not sure wether the hdp causes this behaviour,
but for one of these drives i have the "original" TP600 ,
in which it remains silent (but still wants that [censored].. pw from me;)

In this thread on thinkpad-portal.de you can see + hear another crazy hdd "in action"

regards tom_k

[pianowizard]

Yeah, I triggered this siren (really loud!) twice before, either on an X22 or X20, right after inserting a hard drive. So I pulled out the hard drive and it stopped screaming. I have no idea what happened, perhaps the hard drive wasn't aligned with the pin holes properly, and the pins went into the wrong holes?