Fun with a hard drive that doesn't spin up (PUIS = power up in standby)

I got a WD 3200JS hard drive scavenged out of a device and it just wouldn't spin up.

I figured it must have PUIS set (Power up in standby) but I couldn't get it to boot because the bios on my old system was "seeing" the drive but it would hang just before booting the OS since the drive is in standby.

So how could I get past that?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/hdparm/files/turn_off_poweron_in_standby/

and I downloaded turn_off_poweron_in_standby-1.01.iso

but what to do when it won't boot past the bios?

Well, I figured out that I could power up the drive by using an external power supply. Just supply power to the drive once it's past the normal bios detection routine and before it boots the poweron_in_standby-1.01.iso burned to a cd.


So I boot up with the poweron_in_standby-1.01.iso, then reboot with a knoppix dvd and use hdparm -s0 /dev/sda to turn off that pesky PUIS.

Now all is right with the world.


Thanks to some ideas from this page:

https://www.dbstalk.com/community/index.php?threads/reusing-recycled-drive-from-hr20.197120/page-2