heh, just stumbled on this thread and thought I would share a recent experience with a hard drive of mine.

After I moved, about a year ago, I was setting up a "new" system using some left over parts that I had. I didn't have room for a second drive inside the case, so being a typical geek I just decided to leave the drive in the case, but unmounted and almost upright but leaning a bit because the cable was too short. Well it stayed like that until about 2 weeks ago when I FINALLY bought a new case to correct this problem, yes I'm lazy

Well I mounted the drive like it should have been mounted (flat) and it just would NOT spin up. It had been working perfectly fine with no signs of failure. I took it out, I checked connections, I did all sort of troubleshooting on it. BTW, it was a secondary drive (d: primary partition) on a Win2k server I was messing with. Well I mounted it back in, flat once again, and decided to try again. The BIOS recognized the drive and I could hear it spin. I decided to let win2k attempt to boot up... and it just sat there. It hung for a LONG time, and because I could hear the drive spinning and could see the progress bar on win2k still moving I decided to let it sit for a while and see if it would "fix" itself. I think I let it sit for about 2 hours before finally giving up on it. I reached in to remove the drive and it was SCALDING hot! Well that was strange, considering I have never been literally burned by a hard drive before, so I let it cool down before trying to remove it again. Then inspiration struck me. After the drive had cooled down I removed it from the mounting and replicated the way the drive used to be in the old case, almost standing straight up on it's end and slightly leaning. Funny thing is once I did that the drive worked fine, and still does. Heh, mount it flat and it won't work and gets EXTREMELY hot, mount it the lazy half-assed way I had it before and it works fine. Go figure.

I have no idea if it has anything to do with that last portion of the original post or not. Just thought it was relative in some way

FWIW I didn't care if I lost that drive or not... it's an old drive that was just sitting around that I thought I would use.