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Reviving A Dead Hard Drive The Hard Way
An anonymous reader writes "This guy went to the trouble of swapping logic boards on a dead hard drive to get his NeverWinter Nights save games back and took photos." I would have just used a character editor to get my stuff back, but clearly, I lack the dedication this gentleman has. Regardless of reason, nice work!
It should be done early and often. Hard drives do fail and can do so without warning. Therefore it is very important to back up that valuable data.
It's interesting how he found that the same brand and model of hard drive can have a vast array of different firmware configurations. This seems like it is a bit dishonest to the consumer who assumes he/she is purchasing the same thing that was recommended to them.
Visualize the world of wine
RPGs: They kill. They ruin lives. Just say no.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
The Plist and Glist are stored on some hidden track on the HDD platter. As long as the firmware is the same the drive should work. Although I believe drive companies change firmware without changing the "Official" firmware number. This is done because the changes are only "manufacturing" related. (-;
I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..
Ummm... CN: the drive was -dead-. Ain't nothin' short of a new board that would've fixed it. (Okay -- sending the platters out for oodles of money would have, too.) Also, I don't know why this is labeled "the hard way." I've done it three times, en-toto, and it takes about ten minutes so long as you've got the correct Torx/Phillips/whatever. [Note: DON'T try doing it with the wrong tools; you'll probably just strip the head, and then it gets more fun.]
$.02...
Lazyness, I guess. And holydays can't be counted as a good excuse; he could have traveled back in the weekend in the middle and done the backup then.
Proud patriot and republican voter.
Now, I wonder if I can make use of the warranty on the original drive.........
In other news: how long before he's swapping logic boards on the webserver?
This is news? Wake me when he actually goes inside the drive to get it to spin-up. Anyone working in IT has probably done this at least once. But since this guy is a slack-jawed Windows home user he thought that this process was terribly clever. Clever enough to post a web page about it. Not news, move along.
the no
So when a hard drive fails is it typically the board that has gone bad? I always assumed that a dead hard drive usually meant something had gotten on one of the platters and corrupted some data. I am not really a "hardware guy" though, so in all likelihood I am wrong. If it is usually the board that goes bad why hasn't anybody capitalized on this idea and offered a service that would attempt to restore broken hard drives for a nominal fee (say 2x the cost of a new one)?
Visualize the world of wine
I had to do this same thing about 2 years ago when my power supply fried most of the devices in my old computer. I had no recent backups of my important data. Wow.
R.B. Boyer
My mom, a teacher, made a banner with this quote and posted it in a faculty lounge:
Blessed are the pessemists, for they have made backups.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I had to do something similar with some wet floppy disks back in the day. (backups, I hear you say? Those *were* my backups!)
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
What's the deal with this? More people I know have lost new IDE drives than I ever recall in the past. Are my friends just unlucky, or do drive just not have the quality anymore? I know this assumes that drives used to be better, and that may well not be true, just this is the trend I've noticed. Is it worth buying a new drive (I do need one...), or is it just going to die on me in a few months?
As far as the article goes: What a waste! It must be damn nice to be able to buy TWO new drives to replace the logic board on one! Sure, one of the new drives is usable, but the other is shot.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
if anyone has an idea about a drive that just died on me (Maxtor 4G120J6) i would be much appreciative. Drive spins up, but not recognised by bios. it was working fine, but i came home one day and BAM not recognised. tried in a diff computer, same results. drive alone as master doesnt recognise, and slave w/ my normal config doesnt work. any ideas? i've already filled out the advance RMA form, but i'd sure like to get the data back...
hmm... so he switched the whole logic board?
I did the same thing with a bunch of 1,6GB western digital hard-drives a few years back, I got a pile of broken ones for free and was able to salvage 4 into working condition by changing the logic boards from those that made funny noises to those that sounded fine but the BIOS did not detect.
But it totally kills the warantee..;)
But my 60 gig recently bit the dust, and the first thing people told me to do was stick it in the freezer... (just like he did in the article) Of course I naturall say "But that'll kill it."
theirs? "It's dead already, idiot"
Nine times out of ten, a hard drive dies because of media defects -- then you're (pretty) screwed. Sometimes, the stepper motor dies. Then, you're screwed. But, if you give it juice, and either -nothing- happens (no LEDs, etc.), or the BIOS doesn't see it, it's likeley the board. As always, troubleshoot starting with the obvious, and work toward the unlikely.
He seems somewhat surprised that the price of repairing a hard drive is more than buying a couple of new ones. You are paying to get the data salvaged, not the physical disk back.
Having worked in technical support with a database company, I can tell you how upset people can get when you tell them it's going to cost almost $400/hr to salvage their database. Sometimes it could take upwards of 16 hrs to do it depending on the size and extent of the damage.
How far a little proactiveness and an occasional backup of important data will go.
In C++, friends can touch each others private parts.
Why is this a Slashdot story? It's a common trick. In the early days of harddrives, the drive logic was certainly more fragile than now, and I've salvaged several disks this way.
It's not difficult either, even I could make the swap in thirty minutes, and I'm a total klutz at electronics and soldering.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Rule 1. Always have a backup.
Rule 2. If you changed data, see rule 1.
But, what people forget is to test their backup to see if it can be restored from.
Fight Spammers!
When will people figure out to backup there machines on a regular basis? And more importantly verify those backups. Persoanly I have a large disk farm that doubles up as a media playback and ripping device with a 35 gig DLT haning off of it. Diff backups run nightly with fulls every 2 months I have been working on the same set of tapes for 4 years and this handles my entire network at home. Granted for a home user a small pile of CD-r is probably cheaper if more manpower intinsive. A full backup once a year wouldent be to bad with incrementals daily (how many people make 600 megs of incrementals a week forget daily?)
No sir I dont like it.
Uh. Yes. What he's saying is he would have used a NeverWinter Nights character editor to get the same characters he had before the crash instead of getting the NWN save games off the dead drive.
At this point even my techy friends are thinking I'm crazy.
Forgive my elitism, but your techy friends must be the same guys that always buy stereo jumper cables with gold heads instead of copper to reduce impedance magnitude.
I hope his monitor stops working next and he uses both hands to fix it.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
I've also had good luck pulling data off 2.5" drives by pulling the covers and simply running them through a hardware cloning box (about $120 now). The fact that you're reducing their MTBF to something like 10 hours is irrelevant if you get the job done in 20 minutes.
Oh, act lawyerish: only charge for successful recoveries. That way, the clients even sympathise with you if you don't succeed.
Suppose your drive dies and it has personal information on it, and you can't recover the drive. What's the simplest and most effective way to wipe the data on the drive so you can throw it out?
Programs like character editors allow you to make a new saved game (on a new hard drive) and then do all the hex editing required to change the character's name, level, experience, skills, equipment, etc. No need to get at the old save game.
This is news? I did this when I was 4, last year.
... I did some research on Quantum's HD whitepapers and located similar Quantum HDs that were a different size but released at nearly the same time. After swapping logic boards, the old HD revived. I ghosted up the data and imaged it to a new Western Digital HD and all was restored. My research turned up that Quantum made prematurely dying HDs. Then I reinstalled the logic boards back to their original HDs and tested them out. For some reason, both Quantums worked. So, I formated the Quantums and Ebayed both to other buyers who wanted to revive their HDs. No biggie. It's very common. Hell, I never did this before and it worked for me, easy as pie.
My friend's HD went dead which had all his Palm sync data on there. I found that his HD was no longer being produced, Quantum HDs. So, I had to get one off Ebay. I could not get the correct matching model and HD size off Ebay because no one was selling it so
Kind of an afterthought to an earlier comment of mine paraphrased as "Doesn't MTBF mean anything anymore?"
Hard drives have warranties. Sure, these warrenty periods are shortening, but that's neither here nor there. Given that a drive is going to fail eventually, would it be beneficial for drive makers to offer 'data insurance'? Data recovery is expensive because it's not a common practice. If you paid some reasonable, optional $x when you buy a drive, and the drive goes down, and you could send it back to the maker for recovery (having paid 'insurance' on it), the practice would be more common and the price would decrease. The idea being, like most forms of insurance, you are paying less than what the recovery would cost because the rest is subsidized by the other people who pay but never need it. A third party recovery service could offer this as well.
There are a number of issues I can see with this arrangement (privacy, confidentiality of data, what happens when the drive can't be recovered, what if they just SAY it can't be done, etc), but it's something to think about.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
All this guy did was replace the electronics.
Big deal.
That's not even close to "the hard way". Every bench tech worth their minimum wage has done this same thing more times than they can count. Execpt they usually know that you need the same firmware before they start.
I'll be impressed when someone gets fed up enough to build a clean room in their guest bathroom and recovers a drive with crashed heads.
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I think that this kind of hardware swashbuckling is pretty neat. I think I would probably just have accepted defeat and called it a day.
But what's even cooler is that the guy went and got his own domain for his dead hard drive. Nice.
I have a sony vaio laptop which after a year and a half is playing up. Hard drive
seems to be fine when I boot it but after a while I start getting I/O errors. The drive
makes a LOT of clickaty clackaty noises as if its trying to tear itself apart.
When I run badblocks I usually see different sectors reported bad. Of course
when I called the warranty, they want me to download 6 disk recovery set and
reinstall everything on the laptop. When I run badblocks after shutting the laptop down for
a few hours it usually find very few bad sectors and they are not consistent too.
Before I pack this off for warranty (and google knows what other stupid hoops to
jump through) was wondering if anyone else has seem something like this, and got clues ?
DO NOT PANIC
Put the defective logic board in the new drive and then take it back for an exchange.
The VP of accounting had been, shall we say, non-savvy enough to listen to the IT department's instructions to save all critical data to the network drive instead of the local hard drive. So, naturally, when his desktop machine's Quantum Fireball lived up to its name (as they so often seem to do) we discovered that all his critical data was on that drive. Since losing it was a non-option, I performed a very similar trick to the above. Got it all back, moved it to the network drive. Came THISSSSSSSSSSSSSSS close to giving the numbskull a thin client instead of a desktop, but he made nice with my boss and he got a new laptop instead.
You are not the customer.
What can one say? I guess a collective "Bravo!" is appropriate.
Bravo!
I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
Same here. I replaced fried logic/interface boards on several MFM and RLL hard drives. This is also done by all of the data recovery firms when they get drives in with fried electronics.
I'm glad that the guy persisted and was successful. I'm sure that he's a clever guy. But this is just not "news for nerds." What's next? A story about how someone changed a program message using a hex editor or made his own printer cable using a soldering iron?
I remember one instance where I had to go and take a look at a mail and file server at a university. It was an old RS/6000 and the drive had gone silent after a shutdown. Now as it happens, the machine had been running for years and years without a shutdown (and without a backup) in a non-ventilated area and so the drive motor was probably close to being dead. The drive wouldn't start to spin. The trick then was to open the box, start the machine and gently tap on the drive with a screwdriver. It somehow helped the motor to spin back up.
Cheers acros the room as the machine booted up again because as it appeared, years of scientific works where on that drive. It made them realize how much human sweat you can store on a few hundred MB.
Cheers, Matt
News about the Kettle Open Source project: on my blog
This approach seemed expensive, but as far as bringing a dead drive back to life through surgery, this seemed pretty easy.
"The hard way" would have been buying a new drive, taking it to a cleanroom and transplanting the platters! You'd more than likely lose the use of the 'donor' drive, and there's a higher chance of failure in this much more invasive procedure, but that would be much more article-worthy.
"These people look deep within my soul and assign me a number based on the order in which I joined" --Homer re:
Someone will now buy a hard drive from his brother. A hard drive with the controller removed, put in a different drive, removed again, put back in and all that in an environment quite different from the original manufacturers sterile assembly plant. Ethical.
Other than that, of course, it's really cool.
I passed the Turing test.
At the shop I work at, this is common practice with drives that give absolutely nothing when connected to power. That is, given the drive is a fairly recent one, and therefore still has a stack of brothers in inventory. Often works too. Swap board, hook it up with a blank HD, pull a copy of the data, unswap the board and ditch the bad HD.
Customers love you, if it works.
xchg
jmp emailMe
How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Now let's not promote cheating, Cowboy... ;-)
Hey, even if it's semiethical since he took much time to develop the characters and lost them unfairly, assuming he crafted a character with the exact same items and attributes to replace it, it still promotes cheating...
I was wondering if this could be applied to the infamous deathstar ibms?
and doesnt the logicboard contains the list of bad
sectors?
I also have a Seagate drive (older 1.2G though) that had a part of its board fried and I kept the drive around to get the important data off it (via platter-swapping) although I never got around to recovering it. =)
Pixels keep you awake!
I use Viagra to fix my hard drive!! Works every time.
Ohhh, they didn't mean THAT hard drive.
Another poor sap that bought a Seagate or IBM ATA harddrive. I've killed 2 IBM harddrives and have since got a WD. I know Seagate makes good SCSI and it looks like they are making good SATA but their ATA drives suck.
This was a totally fake demonstration. The whole thing was made up. You can't open up a drive like that and expect it to work. Modern drives have a mechanical self destruct that would destroy the platter once the outer thingy is removed. It's a combination of magnetic sand and a tiny M-80.
Thats why you take backups, so they will not fail. One word of caution though, I hope he was wearing an "anti-static strap" when he did all of this work.
Semper ubi sub ubi
I had a physically dead drive...you know, the dreaded click of death.
Being pissed as I was, I opened up the damn thing and got ready to wreak havoc on the platters.
But I chickened out, (what kinda chemicals might that thing spew out?) and put the drive back together.
To my surprise, the drive worked again!
My room is was a nasty, dusty place too...so I bought a new drive, mirrored the old, and never used the fixed drive again.
I still have it in my house...an old Quantum 6 Gig drive.
Any ideas what was wrong, and how opening the sealed platter compartment might fix anything?
WTF is a character editor, oh elite masters??!!!
If you don't like hard drive crashes and lost data, don't get a western dig. In the last year, I've serviced 3 broken drives (one of them my own.) All Westerns. Thank god for Knoppix, or all my beautiful, beautiful futurama eps would have been lost.
About a year ago, I had a Quantum Fireball IDE drive die on me as the result of me plugging something into the motherboard improperly... I could actually see the burn spot on the circuit board of the HD where it got fried. But all my data was on there!
So after much thought, I came to the realization that it takes a lot of abuse for the data to die, so I bought an identical Quantum Fireball, and swapped the boards.
To my glee, it actually worked, and my replacement HD has been fine ever since.
Some time later, I had a Western Digital HD die on me, although this time, it just died -- I didn't kill it. I went through the same process as with the first, except that the replacement drive was obscenely expensive (this was nearly two years ago with a 40 GB HD), and I had to go out and buy a torx set to pull the circuit board off.
And after I frankenstein'd it, I was disappointed to find that it didn't work... I haven't figured out why, but I figure I can't afford the thousands of dollars to recover the data.
So long and short of it, as long as the problem is just with the circuit board, it can probably be done, if not, you're torx'd.
-brian
OK,
Let me understand this. This guys harddrive failed. So he fixed it. _Then_ he goes out and buys the deadharddrive.com domain name to post his story? This is the top level page on that domain.
I can understand it if he writes the story and posts it somewhere. But getting a domain name for it?
What's the reason? Do people really want a web site with hits on that much?
Well, no disrespect, if he enjoys it, more power to him. I just don't understand.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Who on earth would spend that type of effort just to recover a drive with XP on it...
Got Code?
Hello
:)
I believe the article it worth of reading, even if some poeple say that people do this several times or whatever, you know, most people will just trash the hardrive, cry and restore backups (if any).
And... i believe it's fun to do what he did... i can hear people saying "pay for X service to recovery" or whatever, anyway, everytime someone do this kind of stuff someone have to comment "just for the fun", i believe we have several projects with seems line no usefuel but most of them are just for the fun!
Don't be so hard with this guy.
An improvement can be designed to make the product better.
It can also be designed to make the product cheaper to produce, even if there is some kind of trade off.
At the end of the day, some executive is going to look at a suggested change and think: "will this help us make more money?"
So the latest version is always the best for the company, but is it the best for you? You can't be sure of that.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Did this years ago on a pair of 2Gig seagate. Years prior to this I helped do this on an RP07 to get another 500MB on a Decsystem-20. I cant remember the exact procedure, but did employ the services of a hammer. :-)
What may be going on when you hear does funny noises inside hard drives ? I've that throwing away to the floor could repair it ... are there any other suggestions ?
I had to do that back in '93 on a Seagate SCSI drive. Luckily I had several of them, so I didn't have to buy one to get the working circuit board. I got my data off the one and then put the board back to into the "donor". So in the end I only lost one drive but not the data. The hard way is opening the drive in a cleanroom and reading the data off manually with a scanning head. That's why they charge thousands for that service.
main(O){10<putchar((O--,102-((O&4)*16| (31&60>>5*(O&3)))))&&main(2+ O);}
LN2 is cool!
that there's nothing more dangerous than a geek with a cause and access to the internet Good Job!
I used to do this with MPI 360k 5 1/4 " floppy drives, for the pupps out there thats FLOPPY disk ya know floppy like limp, and Tandon 8".
It's not rocket science... I used to do that for a living. I worked at this place for a few years. Swapping boards on drives is Standard Operating Procedure, we had a whole rack of boards with different firmware revs.
The only trick is matching the firmware to the software written behind track 0 on the drive. Newer drives usually have a good portion of the internal "firmware" actually written at reserved tracks that are only accessed at spin-up.
A really tricky data recovery is when you have a burnt spindle motor. You can't replace those, because the platters are indexed to the hall-effect sensor, embedded in the motor. Lose that alignment and your data is toast.
So, the trick is to go into the clean room, remove the top of the drive - drill a hole in the top directly over the spindle motor, drill, tap and thread a shaft onto the motor, and attach an external motor to spin the drive. You need to attach the external motor to the drive electronics so it can control the speed. And, to make mounting easier, we normally mounted the external motor upside-down and rewired it to spin backwards. You need a solid mount to reduce jitter. You also have to inject some signals into the logic of the drive to fake out the processor so it doesn't realize the original motor is dead. Then power the franken-drive up and back off the data.
I've got a few other horror stories doing data recovery, but swapping boards is childs-play.
Reminds me of this old joke.
"A mainframe computer on which everyone in the office depended suddenly went down. They tried everything but it still wouldn't work. Finally they decided to call in a high-powered computer consultant. He arrived, looked at the computer, took out a small hammer and tapped it on the side. Instantly the computer leapt back to life. Two days later the office manager received a bill from the consultant for $1,000.
Immediately he called the consultant and exclaimed, "One thousand dollars for fixing that computer?! You were only here five minutes! I want the bill itemized!"
The next day the new bill arrived. It read, Tapping computer with hammer: $1 Knowing where to tap: $999"
I had a guy at work who had been saving his work to the HD instead of to the servers where it would have been backed up. The day before he was to present the results of his project to the president of the company, the drive failed.
It would spin up, and apparantly work for a few minutes, then spin down.
Suspecting heat-related problem, I stuck it in the freezer for a few hours, tried it again, got it to run long enough for the PC to finish booting & to copy the data, then it failed again.
Like your people said though, I wouldn't necessarily try it on a drive where less dramatic measure might work.
I mean, I used to think of WD as the most reliable of the HD manufacturers. Now it seems they're in the toilet. What happened to cause such a drastic change? (Btw, I was the poster of the anon comment)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I did this working at a local computer shop once...
The customer's hard drive failed, just wouldn't spin up or get detected by the BIOS. It just so happened, I had an identical drive (Quantum Bigfoot) just sitting around in the shop.
Couple of minutes later, and the old drive spun anew with the new board attached! Then, noting my recent success, the powers that be decided to laugh it up a little -- a loud *ker-THUNK* and the drive was no more. Physical media failure.
Depressing!
Many years ago I used to buy large quantities of dead harddrives from Gateway Computers. I took the logic boards off every one of them and using a known good logic board and a known good drive I'd quickly figure out which logic boards were good and which drives were good. Combine good with good and I'd usually end up with a nice pile of working drives which I resold on Usenet for a nice profit. The dead drives I would either RMA back to the manufacturer or sell as dead drives. That was back when a good drive was worth $1/MByte and I was buying dead ones for 10 cents/MByte. As a side note, all those dead drives used to be someone's good drive and naturally all their files and data were still on the drives.
I've had a hard drive show up as dead, non-bootable. I replaced the logic board on it (with one with a slightly newer firmware; lucky for me it worked) and was able to boot.
Some of the data was unavailable. I think the old logic board must have marked some boot blocks as defects so the entire disk was useless as-was, and the new logic board had a different set of defects in places where some of the actual data was.
All in all, it saved us a ton of hassle. Since the drive itself was old, and we had a similar old drive hanging around, it was really no loss to us - we weren't going to use either drive ever again for important stuff. And the best part is - this customer has given us access to run periodic backups for him! Hooray. Everyone wins.
FYI: There are services out there that charge thousands of dollars for just this very thing.
Overture used to list prices per click at $5+!
What kind of techy friends ARE these? "Hey, he unplugged a faulty board, replaced it with a new one, and IT STARTED WORKING."
What a freakin' miracle.
Now, if you start fixing CRT monitors like that, then you're freakin' crazy.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Monkey wields Torx driver, matches firmware on second try! Slashdot community goes ape! Stay tuned for absolutely no technical content!
Cowboy Neal, why are you posting this crap?
The board lives outside anyway, with all the dust, gerbils, and crazy cooling systems.
As long as you don't break open the sterile case, you could swap boards in a sandstorm and not have contamination issues. The clean assembly is a good idea for the platters, but even that's not really required.
Do you remember the story a few years ago about a guy tricking out his hard drives with pexiglass covers? In the words of Taco(?) , "That, ladies and gentlemen, takes balls!"
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
1. I noticed that the drive that he bought from his brother, and from which he removed and replaced the logic board, then becomes his 'brother's drive' at the end of the saga. If my brother gave me that drive, I would say 'it's your drive now, just pay me.'
2. He didn't seem to spend much time considering how to prevent the cause of the failure--the failing power supply. If he's running an 80GB 'cuda and playing NeverWinterNights, chances are good that his original power supply was not only cheap but also overloaded. Replacing a cheap and overloaded power supply with a new cheap and overloaded power supply means he had better keep his torx screwdriver set handy.
I can't belive this guy spent money registering "deadharddrive.com" for one page on how he got his saved games back.
I would have thought that name would have been snapped up by a data recovery service years ago!
What post? The one you're carrying inside your rusty innards!
I've done this numerous times and it even worked a couple of times. I once completely disassembled a WD 540 meg ide and changed out the stepper motor. Rather than put it all back together I fired it up without the cover on my bench in the basement and it lasted for about 6 hours. Plenty of time to get my non-backed up files off before some dust or smoke (yes I was smoking while doing it) killed it.
If you look carefully at the website, you'll see Mr. Harddrive is another idiot who doesn't know the difference between "it's" and "its".
I have that exact drive and it died a few weeks ago, but I have an Alienware under warranty so they sent me a new one free. If I would have known about this, I could have saved the trouble of having to pack it up and ship it! :)
A true pessimis knows that the backup tape robot also will fail.
"Windows are for cheaters" - Bruce Springsteen
This was part of a time-honored repair procedure back when I used to work on PC's. The basic troubleshooting question was: Would the drive spin up?
If not, remedies would range from the patented wrist flick where one would hold the drive outside the case while the computer booted and tried to add a little inertial boost to the spin motor during initialization to putting the drive in a freezer for an hour.
If it spun up but would not initialize, we would often replace the controller board. A buddy of mine even built a homemade "clean room" with a clear trashbag to open a hard drive and replace internal components. His efforts were successful - the drive worked long enough to back up.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
...oh why did you put your data back on a drive with the same firmware version as the one that crapped out? Wouldn't it have been more reasonable to keep it on the newer drive, which perhaps fixes whatever problem the older one had that made it fail, rather than use the old revision and enable for the possibility of this happeneing again?
Perhaps it wasn't the board, perhaps the power supply sucks or something...but perhaps it was a firmware bug?
Just make backups nightly and you'll be fine
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I noticed that the printed circuit board assembly ID on a 100GB Maxtor disk that I fried this way was the same as that of a working 27GB Maxtor drive that I had laying around, and the boards also looked identical in every way. So, I swapped the logic boards.
When I plugged the 100GB drive (with the 27GB drive's printed circuit board assembly) into a working IDE drive and powered up the compuer, the drive continuously made a fast "click click click click click" sound. Later, I sent the drive to two hard disk recovery centers, both of which opened the drive and said that the head had now crashed too many times for the media to be recoverable.
It would cost as much as 2 drives to recover the data. I think it cost him 2 drives... but he had fun so its all okay. Last time I took apart a hard drive it was with a hammer. it was fun.
It's lazy kids like you that have ruined this industry. Back in my day, we didn't have operating systems.
Hell, I had to write a WYSIWYG word processor on an abacus.
And it made me a better person, I can tell you!
But I swapped the board only to find it was the chip on the head that had failed. Being a wally I opened up the drive and tried to change heads from the new drive to the duff one. Didn't work and the result was two duff drives.
The trick is to make sure that they don't fail at the same time
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
As long as its not lost servo, data can be recovered. If a chip failed on the board then swapping boards should do it.
It's easy to damage servo on some drives because it's embeded on the same track as the data, all that has to happen is the write chip fails and writes past the "end of track", thus wiping out servo.
These high density drives use the embeded method to provide more space for data.
It's amazing more drives don't fail because of glitches that write over servo.
Older drives used to use a dedicated platter and a read-only head for servo. I think they should go back to that method.
So always back up your data, buy two drives and mirror them, it's the best way.
When he booted up, he found a virus on his machine. Tsk tsk...*almost* a happy ending.
I owned a seagate before and they always failed. I currently own an IBM and no problems yet!
Not much of a hardware hacker, are you Cowboy? As hardware hacks go this one is trivial.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Always buy spares for the shelf when the production lot is bought for work or at least two each for home. Use the twin for a mirror. If your backups are tested bulletproof and loss of data since last backup isn't important or your hardware raid controllers aren't finicky about sector counts, etc, exact spares aren't as important. In any case if the model and sub part numbers match it's gold. Even if close, chances are good. Done tons of em. Most worked, none destroyed existing data that I know of. IBM scsi drives seem to lose their paddle boards more often than seagate. Most were built around y2k, +-1y. As for warranty, swap em, recover your data, write zeroes to the drive, swap em back, send it on in, wait a month and you've got that spare/mirror you should've had in the first place. If recovery and zeroing doesn't work, hammer the drive and throw it out even if in warranty unless privacy isn't a concern. Never put drives in the freezer silly, internal condensation will occur which is bad news. You can hear the motor and electronic servo driver make noises if startup stiction is a problem. Open it up and free it, or try to impart enough rotational acceleration to do the same. No, they'll punt visibly scorched/damaged drives back to you, and no, a head crash causes physical media damage that cannot be recovered. Crash = Impact, duh. Yes, all the internal parts can be swapped and will run for a time comparable to how much contamination you introduce, hours to years. Do not disassemble the platter spindle if you want your data, offsets kill. Use a heat gun [hair dryer] and razor blade to soften/peel warranty labels. I've had servers running great but upon soft reboot [power stays on] they die. Turns out the boot drive had rings ground into the first dozen or so cylinders from combining sun's uptime [2years+] with old drives like quantum 105's that don't do background seeking. Once booted, the kernel and apps never hit that drive, heads stayed put, rings were cut. Set your PER [post error bit] to one if possible. Cron for drive in ; do nice -20 dd if=/dev/$drive of=/dev/null bs=65536 ; done once a week. Watch central syslog.
The first drive he bought had a different part number, as you can see by looking at the close-up pics he took of the labels.
.bin file, just like flashing the BIOS on your motherboard (except you can usually do it in Windows). I would contact tech support first, though, and make sure the firmware you need is compatable with the different hardware. You'll probably have to contact them anyway to get the .bin.
Also, firmware can be changed. All it takes is a utility and a
Lastly, if you plan on trying this at home you need to know that Seagate and IBM/Hitachi (and, I presume, other vendors, but those are the only ones I deal with in a professional capacity) classify drives in catagories, like "generic 80GB 7200RPM ATA100" and there are often several part numbers that satisfy that description which the vendor considers interchangable for the purposes of warranty replacement (sometimes that isn't really true, which is the only reason I know this, but usually it is). Basically that just means that there's no real guarantee that you'll get the exact same drive. I've been able to get around that by making enough noise, but I also was acting as an agent of a $25billion company, so YMMV.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Many's the time that a major business transaction has screeched to a halt due to a HD problem. This is just one of many things we've used to get data from a drive. Another is freezing it in a ziplock bag. And it DOES help!
A mechanic actually replaced a screw!
No, really, this isn't much news, I do that all the time at work to get data back for customers, and most often for important stuff (thesis work and the like). The Quantum Fireball CX were notorious for a specific chip failing all the time on the controller. Must have done board swaps 50 times on those (and went through 10 different controllers, even our "good ones" would fail at some point).
This must be a really slow day for THIS to make it to the front page.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
I once had to do this to 18 SCSI disks once, after HP came in to "fix" the backplane of the 20 disk array in one of our HP9000 K-series servers. Apparently, the backplane they brought was wired wrong, and it sent a bit of voltage down the line, thus toasting the logic boards on every disk in the array (which they had replaced in the array prior to powering it up).
Needless to say, HP bought us 18 new SCSI disks...
I had the same notion a while back when my ibm deskstar 75 gxp died on me. The warranty on it is still good but I want to get the data I had off of it before I go through the whole rma process. Does anyone know of a way to get a logic board for my hard drive, model number dtla-307045 ? Do you think if I brought it to a tech support place like compusa or the like they could get a logic board and install it for me?
Lastly I wipe my brother's drive and return it to him.>/i>
Free test parts for troubleshooting from his brother! And to top it off, if the experiment went badly and the drive smoked, I'll bet he still would have returned the drive to his brother. That is what brothers are for right?
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Rule 3. Always ensure you can restore from your backups.
Next topic on /. will be about a guy who took apart the flashlight to replace the batteries.
I'm only human!
Backing up is like voting--most people don't do it but they still think they have the right to complain about the results of their laziness.
I got my hands on a bunch of 20 Meg ST-225 drives that were bad and proceeded to mix and match defective mechanisms with defective boards. Got quite a few working drives from the effort. Did the same thing a couple of years later with some 40 Meg ST-251 drives. I had more trouble with the ST-251's because there are variation between the drives in terms of mechanism and logic boards. I still wound up with two working drives in the end though.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
I bought 4 Maxtor 80 GB drives and had one seize up on me. I was fairly certain that the logic board had fried itself (the screws anchoring the drive came out and the drive started floating free in the metal chassis).
Since I had 4 identical Maxtor 80 GB, I waited until Maxtor sent me a replacement, swapped the logic boards, brought the drive up immediately, and dumped everything over. I sent the drive with the bad logic board back and resumed work.
I doubt I would have gone to the trouble of asking vendors to look up their firmware versions had I not bought several identical drives!
Jory
I use solid state crystals using lasers to read and write.
A guy I used to work with recovered (almost entirely) data from a 8 year old micropolis 1.5gb SCSI. And it ran Interactive Unix. Now those are serious mcguiver skills
from the article:
One of my favourites - put the hard drive in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer - cooling it down shrinks the parts and may enable the drive to spin up properly. I actually try this and get lots of funny looks from my wife. Still, it doesn't work.
He plays RPGS and has a WIFE??? How's that work?
no comment
Try doing it at 3:00am on a detacenter floor with a leatherman on a pair of quantum atlas 10k u3 160 drives. Somehow 2 drives in a raid5 array failed within 6 hours of each other and the customer needed to get back data from changes they made that day.
I did it, it worked, but I never expected to see a headline about someone doing it.
01:36AM up 426 days, 2:46, 1 user, load average: 0.14, 0.11, 0.05
I had two identical Seagate 2.0 gigs and when i was transferring data from my old 540mb, my friend insisted we just stack the drives on the floor instead of all the work of mounting them or even sticking a antistatic bag between them. *pop* The result was one of the drives shocking the other drive. Digital board had a nice smoke plume from one side. A couple of resets later, it was obvious that the drive was dead. We replaced the digital board from one with the other to get the data and then tossed the broken one. My friend knew that would work because the drives were identical (and from the same batch in Malaysia apparently) and he had done it before. The time he had done it before, his brand new drive was flakey within the first week so he went back to the store and they said they wouldn't take it back even though it was a day 7 that it broke and he couldn't get in till day 8 of a 7-day no questions asked replacement. He just bought another brand new drive and replaced the board with the defective one. Went back to the store to a different clerk and returned the "new" drive with no questions asked.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
... your aunt sure has a big box! And how the hell do you know about your aunt's box?
And then you did something with your unit to your aunt's box?
Sick.
First:
....(this drive doesnt fix it)....
I look at some businesses that do hard drive recovery - the prices are exhorbitant! I could buy 2 replacement drives for those prices.
then...
So I go get a replacement hard drive
So I ring around some places and besides having to deal with some hopelessly non-tech sales people I actually find a shop that goes to the effort of looking on the drive for me and it's the right firmware! Cool! I go and buy this one.
So he doesn't want to have the data recovered cuz it costs the same as 2 new drives...
but he buys 2 new drives to recover this hard drive?
no comment
I've saved several HDs that refused to spin up, and given people the impression I'm a miracle worker, with this simple trick:
Absent smoke, 99% of the time the problem is stiction on the bearings. So I just turn the drive upside down and give it a few taps, and the drive will almost always spin up, because now the weight is on the other bearing.
I freaked out a friend, and saved his ass, by telling him to turn his computer upside down and hit it.
Needless to say, once you get the drive running, immediately back it up and throw it away.
"World Domination - a fun, family activity"
Thanks I'm downloading it now.
-Recently: New client: "My hdd is making noise" Me: "I'll diagnose it out at the shop" Me Later: "Mechanical problems, must send to data recovery service" Data Recovery company: "Damage to drive platters, $1300" (BUT!, needed data is not on recoverable area, customer can't get needed data!) MAKE THOSE BACK UPS!! $1300 is a lot of DAT tapes
Once upon a time ...
I made the same thing with a drive that was going to trash (well, a 850Mb one), with the same result.
I wonder if it is opening it or just remove and put again the logic board (some rusted contact you're cleaning by this operation ?)
It had lots of bad sectors, so I just low-level formatted it, and now it works.
You can use your drive again, just think about making backups... exactly as you should do with your other drives.
I even left open a (120Mb) drive under operation, and it still works, except those cylinders where you're seeing it crashed.
One of my favourites - put the hard drive in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer - cooling it down shrinks the parts and may enable the drive to spin up properly. I actually try this and get lots of funny looks from my wife. Still, it doesn't work.
This trick can work on some IBM hard drives. IBM had a problem where you would hear a clicking sound. The reason for the clicking was sometimes that the disk had increased in size due to the heat, and the heads were unable to compensate. Putting the drive in the freezer made the disk shrink getting the heads correctly aligned again.
Obviously, the drive did the same thing after 10 min, but atleast you got the most important data off the drive.
Back in the day, I remember having a 10 meg MFM hard drive whose motor was going. The motor could no longer start the platter spinning from a standstill, so to get the data off it I had to open the cover and start it spinning by hand.
Gateway put Quantum fireball lct10's in a bunch of there early celeron desktops. These drives logic boards blew on a regular basis. How could I tell it was the logic board? You could see/smell where a resistor or whatever it's called on the board blew. Oftentimes you could see where one of the chips on the board melted.
The quantum boards actually had an assembly number on them and are easily matched/replaced with new working boards. When looking for someone on ebay to sell me a replacement drive (for a gateway at work) a seller told me that the last quantum lct10 he sold, the buyer was buying for that exact same reason. This procedure doesn't appear to be anything all that new!
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson
I wonder if he sent it back to Seagate would they have replaced the logic board for him considering it was under warranty. I suppose they're more likely to just replace the whole thing. Bastards.
Um, he did buy two replacement drives in the process of fixing the dead one. (He said he was going to try to return one of them.) The DIY approach was probably a lot faster, though.
I had to revive a drive that failed after a power failure. The machine had been on for a few years straight and the old scsi drives it had used oil bearings. These bearings seize up sometimes if they are allowed to cool.
So i took the drive out of the computer and did everything you would normally do to a drive that was not spinning up, Shaking it, trying different power connectors, etc. Nothing worked. I figured there was not much damage that could be done with a little brute force, so i took a screw driver and started hammering on the side of the disk while it was plugged in. That didn't work either, so i figured it was time to use some REAL brute force. I took the drive and lifted it up about 3 feet off of the ground (still plugged in and powered up) and let it drop. That drive spun up and worked fine for another 6 months until the whole system was scrapped.
Your mileage may vary, but when it comes down to a broken drive, if it's not spinning, there's not much more damage you can do to it.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
Informative. I have to get myself one of those Torx-tools. I dug up 9 old drives from the basement today. Everyone of those little buggers had Torx-screws on them. i had to take a phillips-driver and bang real hard (obviously the drives were all busted already) with a hammer on it to make some new tracks in the screwhead. Mostly it worked without the spanking but one or two of the drives had to be seriously punished.
Anyway, they make nice wall decorations and the warranty warning labels are now on my 17-hole boots.
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
It would inevitably be modded as offtopic. So I saw no reason to.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I did this back in the day with 2 80gb drives. Not very interesting...
Twice! :^)
I've done the "controller swap" to recover data off a dead drive at least 6 times in the last year. One of me co-workers just recently had to do the same on another drive.
It's not generally something you want to do as you could end up with two dead drives instead of one. But in certain situations it is the only way to recover a system that HAS to be up and running and contains critical data that may not have been backed up recently.
Um, a really small and thin regular screwdriver would probably have worked a lot better than the Philips...
Money for nothing, pix for free
...Is that if it is an improvement that the consumer can notice then the product will have a new name or model numbers.
So any changes made to a product, that doesn't change name or model number because of that change, are either minor or to the benefit of the company that makes it.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
Interesting how he placed Google Adds on the site before letting it get slashdotted...maybe he even made a few bucks on this whole deal? Now he can buy that backup-system he's always wanted!
I have performed this on several drives before too. Changing boards on drives that just click as well. Hell I have even cut and redirected IRQ lines to different traces to get modems on different IRQs back in the 90's. Theses are good suggestions to get out to the youger technicians out there. :-)
Yep, I have myself a nice set of Torx drives just for this kind of operation. I've done it several times with Western Digital hard drives, and it's always worked regardless of firmware, for me. As long as the logic board was from an exact model number, it has worked.
And I turned on my computer, and it, like, went "beep, beep, beep....."
I used to do this as a last resort, and was surprised how it did work once in a while. Of course the drive would fail again shortly, but it will give you time to get data off...
Its a good idea to put the drive in a ziplock type bag to prevent unwanted moisture.
Many years ago, I had a dead 400 Meg SCSI drive with a mechanical failure and my friend had the same drive with an electrical failure. Combining my good electronics with his good mechanical section produced a working drive.
:)
400 Meg SCSI drive should date this event
Philip
Interesting how people say BSD has the best network stack, but TCP SACKs are not implemented. Interesting how Walnut Creek runs a huge FTP archive on FreeBSD, transferring over a terabyte per month at one point, and FreeBSD doesn't support S.M.A.R.T.
Bah.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
I was looking for a weekend project!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
9 times out of 10 you'll need either a Philips for most older drives or a T9 torx for your newer drives. Sears has a full set of 'precision' torx/philips/flat for around $20. BTW, old drive platters make for perfect camping/signaling mirrors too as they polish easily and reflect well. So, if you to keep your data in the right hands take it with you :) Lastly, yes, make a freakin' backup because if a component requires more than an hour of time to fiddle with it's probably not worth toying with in the first place for personal systems.
you would just complain and ask why he didn't just switch the boards.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Judging from the pictures it seems he was doing the installation in the dark.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I tried the same thing with 15GB Maxtor harddrives some time ago. Didnt really seem to work. Model numbers were the same but I suppose theres more variety. I lost precious photos and email archives.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I actualy did the same thing with an ibm deskstar 30gb drive. The controller on the harddrive burned and i lost all my data. But i went online to a direct connect chat and asked if anybody had a model of the same type. I manage to find one that hade one that was manufactured one month before mine. So i asked him if i could borrow it and he said yes
:). Think i have the pictures of the swap here someware if someone wants them :)
But when i said what i was going to do he got a bit scared. But all worked well and i must say that im very thankfull that people still belives in the good will of helping others
With many harddisks at 2.5" for laptops, I think it should be easy to produce RAIDed harddisks in the same package to connect to one IDE cable and power supply and fit in a 3.5" or 5.25" drive bay. Each smaller drive could also be disconnected and used seperately in case the RAID chipset is bad. Such a complex drive will sell well given the importance of data at many places. For many servers that I run, I would prefer to pay twice for such a reliable setup.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
9 times out of 10, a drive fails due to logic board problems. Usually heat releated. These days, once the drive core/media is built and certified, they are very unlikely to crash. It is the electronics that are the achilles heel of modern hard drives.
This isn't hard, and is an old common practice in the data retrieval sector of tech work. As long as the "insides" are good, a new logic board should get u up & running. At least long enough to back up....
--DW
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I agree %110. I think I'm losing faith in the slashdot community as a whole. I believe there are only a handful of slashdotters that are really in 'the know'.
We see interesting submissions almost always on Slashdot that are far more complex in nature than this one. I believe the people who are quick to 'put down' some work are the people who would probably do the worst when they are put to the test.
I've done this twice and my customers have thanked me for it (saving them big $$$) Nothing new about this practice. Any method is perfect, as long as the data comes back. Yes, it is incredibly easy to execute this procedure.
"Factory refurbished" -- does that mean they took someone else's defective drive and fixed it or something?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I see this happen at work every few weeks when some customers hard dive shits the bed and they want their precious email or some garbage. I see nothing special enough to warrent the overload of the poor server hosting this page. Move along, nothing to see here
Who would want his own domain just for a short l'il story like that?
It's... News for Nerds! Stuff that Matters! La-de-da-de-da-DE-da!
Hasn't anyone fucking heard of a tape drive?
Anyone who doesn't back their system up deserves to spend a few days doing shit like this.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
It's very relieving to think that it is this easy to recover your data on a hosed HDD. I'm not saying that this information is false, but believe me, if you rely completely on this method and neglect to make backups, you may find yourself in deep shit later. Still, it is great to have this option to try.
/usr/bin/complain >
I think "she" might have a surprise in store for you
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Here is a list of all four uses of "it's" in the article. Only one of them should have been "its", the possessive of "it." The other three cases correctly use "it's" as a contraction for "it is" or "it has", both of which are given in the definition of "it's" at webster.com.
1. "I put my ear next to the drive - there's no sound - it's not even spinning up." Correct it is.
2. "[...] lovely new drive in it's clamshell [...]" This is the mistake. This should use the possessive of "it", "its."
3. "[...] It's the right firmware!" Correct it is.
4. "Yep, it's got the same firmware." This is also correct use, a contraction for "it has."
Granted, some things about the article feel a bit idiotic. The article is nowhere near enough of a technical accomplishment to warrant putting it on the front page, but that is a slashdot editor's idiocy, not the author's or even the slashdot submitter's. Also, when I learned composition, I was taught to avoid contractions in essays for reasons I don't actually remember, but I expect that contractions at least make a document harder to understand for people whose first language is not English, but I don't think this infraction rises to the level of making the author an idiot either.
Someone has already mentioned cars, but in the context of a change that happens during different model years. In fact, cars change during a single year as well! It's not uncommon for people to consciously wait for a few months after the latest car model has arrived in dealerships before making an order. This gives the manufacturer time to "debug" the current model. Little things get fixed or changed here and there. So, on average, the later cars of the same model year are a little bit more reliable.
"neverwinter night saves" uh huh. sure.
For what it's worth, data recovery companies don't "swap the platters." Drives are typically only opened nowadays to fix the servo attached to the spindle, or the actual read-write heads. I believe platter-swapping may have been a viable technique >10 years ago, but nowadays, with the high densities of modern drives, it would be pretty much useless. A hard drive (typically) has multiple platters that are bolted to the spindle at the factory. The drive is then formatted, etc. and boot blocks / initialization code is written onto the platters. All the read-write heads are mounted together on a single arm. The second you loosen the spindle to "swap the platters," said platters become misaligned from one another, maybe even just a minute bit. The drive's controller circuitry normally expects the data to be synchronized as per the original factory platter locations... but now it's all wacky, 'cuz you swapped the platters. There used to be tools / techniques for manually realigning the platters several years ago, but I haven't seen them recently. And honestly, why would you need to separate the platters from one another? The closest thing to a "platter swap" would be to remove the spindle in order to replace the servo motor, but even then, the platters are treated as a single unit. The platters themselves are solid-state, so all mechanical work concerns the servo and read-write head.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
a nice slam on the table to get a drive working.
Back in high school, being on the geek squad meant I fixed all the dead computers in the school buildings in the system.
I had an all-in-one Mac refusing to boot one day, and narrowed it down to the hard drive. After finding that I lacked a replacement for it, I beat it on the table and tried. to my complete surprise, the machine booted fine.
I then called it a day and went home.
"liberty and justice for all those who can afford it"
I remember long before I did this for clients doing it when old MFM drives would start to die. Why do you think we old-hat tech geeks have at least two of everythign on our shelves?
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
3 months ago. . . 3 months of emails, 3 months of code, 3 months of NeverWinterNights save games . . . who cares?
.Where's my screwdriver!?
3 months of porn. .
Same thing happened to me. My whole high schools yearbook was on one dead hard drive. So they came to me asking them to help them. Luckilly I was able to find the same hard drive and replaced the logic board. And in the end, we recieved our yearbooks on time.
i wonder how many impressions this guy needs to get paid by google adsense for this article?
Me and a friend of mine did something similar in the late 80's or so. He happened to have two 40 meg MFM drives. One died.. So he was down to 40 meg total. Then that one died... We did a bit of "part swapping" (much like this /. post was about) to get one 40 meg drive back up. We thought it was "neat", but not much in the way of hack value.
Oh.. We were not trying to recover data. We just wanted working storage!
[Quote]I look at some businesses that do hard drive recovery - the prices are exhorbitant! I could buy 2 replacement drives for those prices.[/Quote]
Well you bought 2 replacement drives. Only now you killed a good one to revive the old one. But alteast you have a back up now.
Running a good powersupply on a UPS still does not stop the user from running fdisk.
We had a customer with a rather large database that died with his hard drive. We had the same model in stock. One of the guys in my office took the drive physically apart, swapped heads, and read 98% of that database onto a new drive before it died again.
Now that was a trick. Logic boards? Phhhhbt.
-- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
I can't believe this made Slashdot! I coulda been famous.... I coulda BEEN somebody! :)
Actually, I've done this several times. The toughest thing about the whole process is actually finding the identical "donor" drive. The first time was probably 3 or 4 years ago when a faculty member fried her hard drive. You could actually *see* which chip blew out. There was a little scorched hole and soot around it and everything.
So, I managed to find another drive on eBay and ordered it. I got it in the mail, swapped the cards, and boom, it worked.
A year and a half later, she shows up at my door again... same hard drive... SAME blown chip. The only problem is that, these days, it's not easy to find this particular Quantum Fireball 10GB. (Actually, it has just struck me how apropos the "Fireball" moniker is for this drive).
Anyway, I eventually found a dude selling the same drive, same model number and even the same controller board revision markings. Bid... won... swapped and then immediately copied everything onto one of our servers, burned her personal files onto CD, and told her to copy her hd to some different model of drive and to toss the Fireball.
Seriously though... this kinda thing gets you featured on Slashdot? Sheesh. I supposed next you're going to feature some "printer hacker" who refills his own ink cartridges.
I guess he was joking. It is not a good idea to publish evidence of one's guilt on the Internet before attempting warranty fraud.
He just swapped the controller boards. That's not the hard way.
The hard way is pulling the platters and breaking out the MEMS...
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
This story is completely true.
In the mid 80's, I got my first computer. My family has always had computers. My father is a rocket scientist, and I spent my childhood actually soldering them together. But this time, it was mine. It was a brand-new 25 MHz 386. By all measures, it was a monster. The drive was so big I had to partition it! DOS was limited to ~20 MB partitions, so I had to split it into two logical drives. It blew my mind.
I loved the machine. I bought it at fry's, and it just flew. Over the next few months, I migrated all my data over to it. I had amassed quite a large amount of code over the years. My entire second partition was dedicated to it.
Shortly there after, I learned the importance of backups. As soon as I had moved the data to the new machine, my father was quick to delete it off the family machine. He only had a 4 MB MFM drive, a full height 5.25-inch monster. I swear it took that thing a minute to spin up to speed. Anyways, I never really thought that much of it. Then one day. The machine blinked off. It would not turn on. Period. After taking a good look at things, it was obvious that the power supply had blown. I then took it back to Fry's, and they serviced it and had it back to me in a couple days.
After getting it home, all plugged back in, I pressed the power button. The screen blinked on, POST began. Then my machine exploded. Literally. Lightening and all. After pulling the power cord, and letting it cool, I opened the case. It was not pretty. The motherboard was black. Everything was melted. I took a close look at the power supply, and noticed that the paper "tamper" seal was broken. I pried it open to find the fuse wrapped in aluminum foil. No doubt what caused this problem! They blamed me for the fuse... but that is another story. The real tragedy was the drive. The logic board was literally fried. The chips were blown off. Sadly, knowing that the data was lost, I set the drive on my windowsill were it sat for the next 8 years. It was a constant reminder of the need to backup... But the story doesn't end here.
I later went to high school, then college, then came back, then got a job on a tech support line. While working there, I helped out the IT dept with machine upgrades and repairs. One day, when I was upgrading a machine, I was asked to put in a larger hard disk. The drive I pulled out looked identical to the drive I had in my PC all those years earlier. I then had a crazy thought. I wonder if this logic board would work on my old drive. If it did, would the drive even spin up? I had to find out.
The drive was to be recycled/thrown out, so they let me have the board off of it. I took it home, dug my old drive out the boxes from college, and turned it over. I was dumb founded. The model was exactly the same. Even the Revision. I removed the burned up logic board off the drive, and then replaced it with the "new" one. I took the drive over to my computer, and plugged it into a free power connector (real men loose the covers to their computers). IT SPUN!!! HOLY SHIT IT MOVED!!! Totally freaked out, I shut the machine down and plugged in the data cable in and booted the computer.
Then came hell. Keep in mind that this drive had been sitting for almost a decade. The bearings groaned awfully. I was afraid they were going to seize. I quickly tried to switch to "D:". No luck. I thought I was screwed. I worked for hours trying to get the drive to show up properly. I was getting nowhere. It was then that I turned to good ol' Norton. Back then Norton was actually a TOOL! Hard to believe I know... but it's true.
Using Norton disk edit, I was actually able to recover ALL of my lost code. Useless as it now was. I immediately printed it all out, and I have the printouts to this very day. It was a complete miracle to be able to recover it at all. And it amazes me that it was even possible.
When I worked with the technical service at a local computershop (paradigit, Utrecht) we once did the same.
A man came in with a broken computer. He didn't know how it happened, but we suspected lightning strike. The chips at his harddrive and graphics card had literally exploded, while some on his motherboard had melted. Obviously, his HDD was lost, but the man had 3 months of work on it and no backup (This incident is when I started making backups of anything important).
Anyway, we took a box of hdd's that were up for warranty (quantum bigfoots, which failed 25% of the time), swapped the boards, and it worked. We copied all of this to a new hdd, and presto. Happy man, for only the price of a new harddrive and f25,- labour costs (about US$10 at the time).
Luckily for him, we didn't need to go searching different firmware boards. But even the more experienced people at the shop had never encountered something similar before, so it was quite exciting.
the pun is mightier than the sword
Um, in Sweden, Philips IS the regular screwdriver. =) :D
Are we talking about the same hardware here? The one shaped like a "+".
I always tend to break the "-" ones.
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
Pray tell, how do you use a character editor on a drive that the BIOS doesn't recognize? This is a new approach to me, and I've been in the business for nearly thirty years. Please elaborate, I like learning new tricks.
Keeper of the terrible karma ---
Well, in MY part of Sweden, regular screwdrivers are the - kind and called "skruvmejsel". Both the Philips and Pozidrive variants of the + are (quite erroneously, as Bosse Bildoktorn demonstrated in the last show,) called "stjarnmejsel".
Money for nothing, pix for free
Maybe 10 years ago with a scsi drive.
:)
I guess I couldn've started Slashdot on a BBS with that story
-- Leeeter than leet
There's now a FAQ on the site
I never thought i would see the day "Bosse Bildoktorn" was mentioned on slashdot. :D
You cant fight in here, its a war room!
I knew a guy (I'll be nice enough not to name him) who discovered a dead drive and took a multimeter to it. Found the power wasn't making it past the power connector. There was a tiny surface-mount resistor that was serving as a fuse. He replaced that, and got the data back. Much cheaper to pay for a $.01 part than a replacement drive.
You, sir, are a cunt.
I did the same thing on my 80 GB maxtor but it didnt help (yes, I had the
right PCB firmware! I asked maxtor what I should have and they helped me).
The motor would spin down after some secons.
But at least I tried.
Nowadays, I backup everything. Before I didnt backup everything.
Well, he's a bit of a cargeek, isn't he? ;-)
Money for nothing, pix for free
The real question in this case would be "how many beeps?", as the beeps are a low-level error-reporting tool.... search google for bois beep error or something ;)
The first time I did this was back in '93 when transporting around a hard drive in a shoe box from work to another location. I had 3 months of work on a Seagate 1GB SCSI and when I got back to work, it wouldn't mount. Careful examination showed a missing capacitor.
Fortunately I was working for a drive/storage company and they had another of the same model in the back. A quick swap of mother boards and I could see the drive again.
Then last year, I had three Maxtor 80GB IDE units all fail. In each case it was the electronics. Maxtor shipped out three replacements, of which only one was the identical model, but that was good enough,. One by one I moved the PCBs from the good unit to each of the bad units and backed up the data onto a new hard drive.
Now, I always buy hard drives in pairs or triplets in case the board fries, which seems way too commonplace with IDE drives.
i had a hd die due to a short in the PSU, so i called ibm and asked what to do. after asking a few times and an email, i got info on what "not to do" *wink,wink*. basically, it boils down to getting a HD with the same MLC code, which there are about 3-5 for every model. ebay is the cheapest place, because the refurb and spare parts distributors wont want to talk to you. $60 later on ebay and assurances the MLC code was right, i got the drive and swapped board, viola! it works! i DDed that sucker as fast as you could imagine.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.
here's another site that shows you how to do the swap.
The biggest trick the devil pulled was letting lawyers become politicians so they can write the laws.