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!

Comments

Re:been there, done that.

[krumms]

I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..

Blindfolded. As did any respectable man back then. And we liked it.

Re:been there, done that.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could walk? Lucky bastard!

Re:Once Upon A Time...Any IDeas?

[eap]

Any ideas what was wrong, and how opening the sealed platter compartment might fix anything?

You probably had what we in the industry call "Data Pressure Buildup". This occurs when bits fall off your hard disk into the casing. The controller then writes new data into the spot where the old bit fell off. However, now you've got extra bits floating around in your platter compartment.

Eventually, the miscreant data starts clogging up the pressure equalization valve and the pressure in the drive increases to a point where the heads cannot read or write anymore information and are actually repelled by the media surface -- thus the clicking sound.

A quick solution is to slightly open the hard drive so the bits can escape. Just make sure you are not near any sort of data network, because the leaking bits can escape onto the Internet and cause further damage. This further illustrates the need for good internal firewall rules.

Oh, you had an operating system?

[Population]

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!