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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'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
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
Actually, current drives DO warn you when they're failing.
i have 30 gig unit here that used to be on my aunt's box. i replaced it because... SMART told me it was failing.
i attached a new unit on the box, mirrored the disk and took the bad one out.
SMART is an old technology already, is present in all IDE units and all motherboards i've seen in the last 5 or 6 years, but many people ignores it. trust me, worked once for me and my aunt, so download a SMART monitor and put it running along with your lm_sensors daemon.
What ? Me, worry ?
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:
Uphill, both ways, at 30 degrees below zero with 3 inches of visibility.
And we liked it.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
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.
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:
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.
--When I was your age, had to walk 40 miles through the freezing rain to get an operating system, with no shoes. And system calls?! Forget about it...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Who on earth would spend that type of effort just to recover a drive with XP on it...
Got Code?
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!!!
You could walk? Lucky bastard!
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!
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.
thought you were going to say backing up is like voting - because nobody does it
bite my glorious golden ass.
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!