[sdfjkl]

I've fixed this problem a few times (on different drives) by giving the drive a not so gentle thwack with a hammer. The trick is to hit it on the long side, which tends to dislodge the stuck heads/arm. If you hit it on the top or bottom, you're likely to break something, and hits on the short side aren't likely to achieve anything at all.

[LIV2]

Many jobs ago we had an outage caused by 2 drive failures in a Raid 5 system, that was resolved by banging the drives on the ground a couple of times before putting them back in.

If I still worked with physical servers I'd be carrying around a rubber mallet to apply "percussive maintenance"

[pmiller2]

I've used this method after the fridge/freezer method failed. It seems less likely to cause data loss than using a magnet to move the head as in the article.