Seagate spindle lock-up issue

[tiebird321]

I went to plug in my 300GB external today
It has a seagate barracuda 7200.8 300gb drive
The drive failed to show up in windows and so I unplugged it after 10min to figure out what was going on (had walked away from computer after turning it on)
Upon removal from the enclosure the drive was rather warm (~20F above room temp)
when I plugged it in the drive would make motor/servo sounds but not spin up. like it was trying to but it just couldn't as if the motor wasn't getting enough power or the spindle was locked
I had a second drive of the same make and model in my other external enclosure so I tried swapping the HD controller boards (the PCB's on the bottom of the drive)
after doing so it was still having the same issue
holding the drive in my hand i did not feal any torque from the drive trying to spin up
so I reinstalled the origional pcb and tried again, and still not working.

so I tried the last resort
I grabbed the drive with my hand and twisted it back and forth
parralel to the platters to try and get them spinning a little
a simpler way of doing this would be to place the drive flat on a
desk and try spinning it back and forth rapidly with some force

I plugged the drive in and low and behold it spun up normaly
I copyed 200gb of data off of the drive (all that was on it) without issue
I have yet to spun the drive down to see if it will spin back up as I
am doing a data verification to make sure everything came off good
the drive is only 6weeks old
and I plan to RMA it ASAP

I am curious of anything that could have caused this on such a new drive
I just cant think of a good reason for the spindle to have locked up and just doing what I did fixed it.....
make model info:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 (IDE) 300GB
model: ST3300831A
firmware 3.03

 

[DougLite]

External enclosure? The power supply in it may not deliver enough +12 to spinup the drive, while being to provide plenty of current for normal operation. Have you tried it in a desktop?

 

[tiebird321]

External enclosure? The power supply in it may not deliver enough +12 to spinup the drive, while being to provide plenty of current for normal operation. Have you tried it in a desktop?

Yes i did try it in my desktop it was the first thing i did, i was hoping at first it was just the external enclosure but it did not make a difference
the external enclosure is a very high quality one with a 12v 4amp/5v 4amp power supply
its actualy an old scsi case that i converted that was origionaly for full height 5.25" HD's
I measured the lines under load and they were running at 12.05v and 4.95v

 

[DougLite]

RMA time.

 

[tiebird321]

yeah i plan to,
i'm just trying to figure out wtf happened so it would't spin up
and why jolting the thing made it work again... its dam wierd
i thought the days of slapping stuff to make it work was out ages ago
I have never had a HD do this to me before

 

[tdg]

Sounds like a faulty motor in the drive. At least you got it going and you copied all your stuff off though