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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!
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.
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.
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!
Yup, you can (easily) flash the firmware. I've flashed several Seagate disks (Barracuda IV) without any failures. :-)
Of course, one of them died shortly afterwards because I didn't cool it well enough.
I wrote this a while back -> http://www.acdev.org/sbiv_firmware/
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.
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!
Not only firmware differences. Some years ago I had a WD 1.6GB drive and the board went bad. I talked to WD and they said that simply swapping the board was not guaranteed to work. The reason is, for every drive, during manufacturing they tweak parameters on the board, sometimes by writing values into an EEPROM. This is done automatically by calibration equipment. Such values control head gain, servos, etc. If you merely swap boards, you run the risk of then getting marginal or erroneous performance. Even in modern drives there is still plenty of analog at the front end, and things like gain and servo tracking in the read channel are important. So this guy was lucky indeed because it was not 100% likely to work.