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Resurrecting Dead Harddrives?
Broue Master asks: "The main harddrive of a friend's computer stopped working. He described to me that the computer began by emitting strange 'scratching sounds', and after a while, it made a 'loud *tock* sound' and stopped. He tried to reboot it but soon realized that the harddrive wasn't spinning anymore. He asked me if I could revive it, at least long enough so that he could retrieve at least his "my documents" folder. The computer was running XP. I did a little googling(tm) of my own to find out that the most recommended solution out there seems to be 'freezing' the harddrive for a day in a ziplock bag. I'd like to know what fellow Slashdot readers have done in the past to try and resurrect dead harddrives and if the freezing method would still be a good idea, today. The harddrive is a Samsung 30Gb." A good 95% of the time, once an HD is gone, break out the shovel, because it's time to bury it. Still, it would be interesting to note, if only from an anecdotal standpoint, if any of you have managed to perform such miracle hardware resurrections. Have you managed to revive a dead and decaying drive from the dead long enough to pull data off of it? If so, what did you do?
try finding an identical drive and swap the electronics.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Try it, it might free the spindle motor.
Or try heating in an oven at about 150 degrees.
Remember, it is dead, so anything goes. I've gotten one to live a little longer by banging it.
Fellowship 9/11
I've heard of freezing a drive and I know people that have recovered data off an overheating drive by constantly spraying some kind of cooling gel on it.
But in this case, it sounds like drive mechanics. I'd be happy to be wrong - but I don't think you can recover a mecanical failure by just making it really cold. In fact, you'd think this would really screw with the electronics.
I have seen some people take the platters out of a bad drive and put them in another HD. It works, but you have to be extremly careful, as not to scratch the platters.
Heh,
My main drive died yesterday, turned on the computer.. wirrr, click.... wirrr, click. so i took it out of the computer and turned it upside down, gave it a little shake, and walah it spun up. I've managed to back up my data off of it now, and hopefully it'll last till the replacement drive shows up tommarow.
Back in the days of 1GB SCSI drives ...
Sometimes they'd get 'stuck' if they were left on for a long time (like a year or two), then turned off. At this point they wouldn't spin up, or make a half-hearted attempt to.
If they couldn't be coaxed into moving, taking it out the enclosure and letting it drop four centimetres or so flat onto a wooden table often got them unstuck enough to grab the data and back it up.
That said, have had some success with the same trick with newer drives with different modes of failure. Of course try the least invasive approaches first and work up, but if the drive is otherwise dead, then there's little left to lose. Unless you want to spend big dollars with a professional data recovery mob.
hard drives are so cheap these days it might be worthwhile to do a daily rsync to help save your data. This is what I do, rsync/tar over to another system for my backups. It's nice to have a backup copy on spinning media nearby.
I had to get data off a dead drives a few times before. The drives didn't make much noise, except for not spinning up.
To bandaid it I un-screwed the cover, and gave the platters a quick spin (make sure to only touch the SIDE of the platter, not the surface).
I put the drive back in the PC, and it started up just fine. I then quickly copied the most important data off of that drive, and then made a copy of the entire drive to another known good one.
Well if it's dead, and the data isn't very important, time for drastic measures.
It sounds like a mechnical problem, a head crash that went as far as pulling the head right off the arm, and wedging it between the platters, or the bearings died.
Freezing it won't hurt anything, but beware condensation when you take it out of the freezer.
I'd recommend getting in the cleanest room you can, preferably with high humidity to reduce dust.
Take off the cover and look for metal shavings in the inside. If there are no metal shavings visible, then the bearings have gone, and you might as well give up.
If there are metal shavings, then there's a chance you can recover data. Try to move the platters/heads, if the heads aren't in the landing zone, then this WILL damage the platters (a little).
If the top head is the bad one, you are lucky. Try to rig it in a way so the platters can turn again. If it's a head between other platters, you are going to have to pull the platters out, which is not easy at all.
Anyway, if the data is worth more than $1000 to you, then send it to a professional recovery service. I don't think an electronics board swap will help anything in your case. It would only waste time and money.
Doing any and all of the above things may damage the disk more than it already is. You've been warned.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
If there's important stuff which your friend really needs retrieved, don't mess around with it yourself; find a top-notch data recovery shop and have them deal with it.
A drive which doesnt spin will spin again if you freeze it. Actually, in my experience, it will spin to.. hmm.. is "gyroscopic speeds" a technical term? It spun pretty damn fast, so that you felt resistance while moving it. No actual data recovery, but sure did spin. I'm surprised the innards didnt fly apart in the casing. I still have it. It's fun.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Most big data recovery operations keep new units of every type and model of hard drives around for recovery. If you had an armature go, they pull your platters out of your drive, and put them in EXACTLY the same make and model HD in their clean room and try to recover the data with standard software. You could try and do this yourself but buying EXACTLY the same make model and series of drive. But opening up one of these units while not in a clean room is not a good idea.
For sector damage, non physical damage, there are tons of tools like this and this out there that might help. But sometimes the damage to the MBR and backup MBR are so bad that recovery tools might not be able to make sense of the bits. I have one sitting right here that is like that. Somehow the bits got shredded over the ENTIRE disk. I assume there was a physical malfunction that dragged the head across the platters and made Swiss cheese of it.
Fear Is the Only God
During the Fujitsu Fiasco....
/mnt2 ; mount /dev/hda1 /mnt ;mount /dev/hd[cd]1 /mnt2 ; cd /mnt ; cp -a /mnt2/* .
I froze my HDDs when recovering data on a marginal drive, those drive had a heat expansion problem on their chips so freezing gave me a longer time to copy data to a new drive.
I use Slackware install CDs to copy the data off
1 Remove and chill HDD
2 Install new HDD and format
3 plug up old HDD on secondary Interface (sometime better as a slave does)
4 boot Slackware CD (CD-ROM on primary)
5 mkdir
if the drive does nto respond at all at this stage
try swappign drive PCBs over with one teh same model
failing this PANIC !
Type unto others as you would have them type unto you.
It does sound like a really bad case of head crash. I don't know how easy it would be to replace a bad head, esp. if the arm broke off completely and got lodged.
Even if the top one is the one that failed, it would be difficult to recover a readable form of the filesystem. "Rigging" it out of the way wouldn't allow you to read the cylinders of the whole disk.
You don't have anything to lose, if it's already screwed. You couldn't screw it up any worse than it already is by freezing it. I don't think I would try and heat it though as a previous poster suggested.
Whatever you decide to do, good luck!
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
From the sound of it it was a nasty head crash.
If the value is high enough send it to a qualified recovery company. If your willing to risk it and you have the tools, swap the platters from the bad drive to an identical known good drive.
Odds of getting it running with cold or hot is low considering the reported noises.
Qualified recovery company figure 100% they get data and probably about 90% of it. Odds of switching platters yourself and getting most of your data figure 60%, odds of using cold (freezer) or heat (it can work...) 30% or so.
BTW if you do the freezer make sure and bag it. You don't want a lot of nice humid air on your drive when it's nice and chilly.
Now back to my Thorazine...mmmm thooraaaszzzzzhhhh....
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
Take the drive out and have cables long enough to set the drive flat on a smooth non conductive surface, like a bench or table top. Turn the system on and give the drive a quick spin about a quarter turn around the axis of the platter, then listen to see if it spins up. If it was just a sticky spin motor it might let go, if it does, try and get your stuff asap. I've recovered data on a few drives like that. I've had a couple were this worked once but not twice, so you shouldn't press your luck. It's a long shot, but it gives quick easy results if it works.
www.drivesavers.com
Gabriel Ricard
a friend of mine said that he has saved the data of many people in the same situation by leaving the HD in the backseat of his car while he is at work on a sunny day. When he gets home, sometimes the heat will let it spin up just long enough to pry away any salvagable data. I know for sure that it has worked for him at least 3 times.
-kyle
I had a dead drive that I kept around for a year just in case some miracle recovery cure came up. Sure enough I heard about the freezing thing and six months ago broke out the HD, stuck it in a plastic bag (in hopes of tricking any condensation into adhering to the other surface) and threw it in the freezer while I went and "prepped my system" for getting a drive in and fired up asap.
On the first attempt I had put the drive in the freezer for only about 20 minutes (hey, I was anxious) and it fired up. I browsed to the drive's directory before it crapped out on me, but I knew I was close. So the drive went back in the freezer while I thought of plan B.
On the Second attempt I left the drive chill for 45 minutes and this time when I took it out, I brought it out on a frozen gel pack. I was able to get all my data w/o condensation or other complications.
I'd like to say that my data was fine, but somewhere along the line my poetry and stories really started to really suck. It must have been corrupted at some point because I swear it was better when I wrote it. Hopefully your data will retain it's value...
This seems like something that would take an excorsism to fix, but I have an 80GB drive that was in a server running windows 2000 (not my first choice, mind you, the new server is a Fedora core 1 box) that experianced an undue amount of heat and has proven to be a pain to revive. On one attempt the drive claims 800 GB in size and another it claims an 8 MB size, however I was once able to mount one of the partitions through Linux (alot of good it did, turns out all I recovered was a useless windows 2000 system partition). Has anyone seen this kind of error before, and if so would freezing the drive help, or is it without hope?
'I am a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, and smothered with secret sauce' -Jimmy James, News Radio, 1996
If the heads are stuck to the platters, it works exactly as the parent comment says. Just jerk the drive case sharply so that the case rotates around the platter axis. This should break the platters free. After that, you may not have much time. Be quick about copying the data. This has worked for me on several occasions (but that was a long time ago, now Western Digital drives are much more reliable).
A hard drive stopped working for me just a few days ago, and now I'm trying to determine exactly what code I hadn't backed up before I tell my boss :-(, he's probably going to be angry I didn't backup better...turning on the PC makes it make a toc toc toc sound and the bios can't find it and says something like controller error. I tried Knoppix and that says something similar before booting without any drive mounted. Its a seagate IDE drive in case that spurs a memory in some slashdotter about seagates failing and how to repair them. To complicate the issue the drive is in a 4 year leased computer which has to go back next week, so it couldn't have happened at a worse time. I nearly had heart failure when I saw my boss and *his* boss standing around discussing it... I thought they might try to switch it on.... so if any one has extra advice for me I'd be glad to hear it :-)
Not just "back in the days". In the past three months I had two WD 40GB drives go bad at work. In one case repeated power-cycles "revived" the drive long enough to copy off the couple files that weren't already on the server. In the other case I had to resort to the drop method. I dropped the machine about 5cm onto the carpet and the drive spun right up. We copied a couple files and replaced the drive.
I also had a machine that had been sitting idle at home for quite a while (even my wife doesn't turn on the one remaining Windoze machine anymore). It wouldn't boot but worked fine after the drop treatment.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
The sound described is highly indicative of either spindle seizing or a head crash. neither is something you're likely to recover from.... it's possible if the spindle has seized that a strong lateral motion when it's powered on might break the disk free and allow it to spin up again.
So you can power it back on and clonk it into something but I wouldn't hold out a whole lot of hope.
This can be a (very) temporary fix with a drive that's having problems with the electronics. Often if components are flaking out but haven't actually fried, they'll run when they're cold but die when they heat up. Get it cold and then power it up and work fast. You'll probably only have a few minutes at a time though. The same applies to motherboards, chips, and memory. To give you more time, you should probably set everything to as low speed and low voltage as you can get away with. I actually did this with a machine outdoors in 15 degree weather once. The machine had been crashing during boot and I couldn't get another machine to recognize the drive's data format ( it was a strange integrated controller on the motherboard ). Outside it booted and ran for two hours while I copied all the data over a long ethernet cable I'd ran out a window. Turned out to be the motherboard. After a replacement with something a little more generic and a reformat, I copied everything back to the drive and it was fine.
Granted this probably has nothing to do with your current drive problems. It sounds like it blew chunks with physical problems. Even if you could get it working again I'd bet you've got significant platter and/or head damage and any data you could get off it would have serious corruption issues. Scratching noises and loud thumps coming from hard drives are never good things.
no, no: "voila" is the *metric* spelling. in america it is "walah".
it's people like you who cause spacecraft to fail.
I've had good luck with stiction (drives that wouldn't spin up.) Fire up the machine with the hard drive held in your hand but connected. Then hit it gently on the side with the handle of a screwdriver a few times or until it starts spinning. This gets the heads sliding across the platters to overcome the static friction, and then the platters can spin up. The drive may only attempt to spin the platters for the first few seconds of startup, so if it doesn't work fairly quickly, power down and start again. Use increasing amounts of force until it works or you destroy the drive. Either way, you'll feel better.
Embedding the heads in the platters has a good name. If the heads are cutting furrows in the platters, they've "gone farming."
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Crashing HD: scratch-scratch scratch-scratch
Data recovery firm: *cha-ching!*
No sig to see here. Move along.
don't forget the Lube. My office spent $2200 to recover less than 10 MB of data off a drive hit in a power outtage.
Norton DiskDoctor told me to take it out and shoot it because it was suffering. Partition Expert didn't even want to make a raw copy of it and Partition Magic just laughed at me.
If the drive isn't even spinning up and stopped after a *thonk*, the only options are to send it off for a wallet-cleaning, or open it up and see what happened. My guess is some kind of head crash or catastrophic bearing failure in which case your friend is pretty much SOL with regards to option #2. He should have made a backup immediately when it started making those noices. Live, learn.
Money for nothing, pix for free
If you(r friend) really need the data and have no recent backup, call a professional data rescue company and pay them some 100 dollars to get the files back from the harddisk (that's how laptop "backups" are done at the company I work for - not very clever, but it avoids thinking about a backup strategy). Don't make the problem worse by fiddling with the drive, it will make the job harder for those people who know how to read from a broken drive.
If the data is not that important that you are willing to pay some 100 dollars for it, take a big marker and write "LESSONS LEARNED" onto the broken drive. Buy and use(!) a backup software that writes your important data from the new harddisk to CDROM, DVD, tape or another harddisk and verifies(!) what it wrote.
If you really need the data, but can't afford the data rescue company, you may try to torture your drive (heat, cold, shock, shake, hit) until it is really dead or spills out a few files.
Tux2000
Denken hilft.
Ok, this does not answer the initial question, but:
...?) before everything fails!
Better than any method of data recovery is to have a look at your system log or the S.M.A.R.T. values of your drive as long as it's alive and to look out for signs of impending doom.
That way you can backup your important data (music, divx-videos,
It's quite strange when you hear someone complaining that his important data is lost, and "oh, yes, it made those funny noises for half a year!"
It worked for me (and by IBM 30 G drive). One day the disk began with the klonk sounds that many IBM drive owner know about. It was no longer accessible. It was under warrenty, but there was no way I was sending it back before having the data wiped.
I decided to try the freeze method (froze it for about 2 hours) and it worked, though I had to turn the drive up-side down aswell.
After the "treatment" the drive actually ran another few months, before it finally died completly.
Informative???
ROTFL
Triplicates in multiple locations in case of fire, theft, etc.
It is similar to dd, but it does not exit on I/O errors. So it is perfect for pulling as much data as possible from a bad drive. It also has a nifty optimization wherein it uses 16kB blocks to copy until it gets an error, then it goes down to 512 byte blocks so it can get as close to the corrupted sectors as possible.
I just used this to recover all but 500kB of data from a 120GB drive that went bad. The method was simple, albeit long:
Why not try beating the sh** outta it? I'm sure that'd make it cough out enough blood for you to reconnect its vitals long enough to access "My Documents" :-)
http://efil.blogspot.com/
While manufacturers are moving away from heads that touch platters, it is recent and not universal.
Learn about HDDs here
The heads should never touch the platters while the drive is spinning at full speed, (very bad, but it happens, and will cause damage) but the heads rest on the platters when the disk is stopped. The spinning platters drag enough air to lift the heads as they approach full speed. When stopping, the heads are carefully put into the landing zone to park so that there is no danger to the data.
There are exceptions. IBM started parking the heads up and away from the platters on some laptop drives around 1998, so Hitachi inherited the technology. Fujitsu now uses something they call rampload that is probably similar.
This still looks far from universal, unless the drive manufacturers are trying to keep it a secret. These same manufacturers silently redefined a megabyte to boost their capacity numbers by less than 5%. They'd brag about it.
If take apart a disk drive carefully enough, you'll see how the heads rest. Fun way to dispose of a broken HDD too.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Does anyone know where to find this S.M.A.R.T. data.
I've also had SCSI discs going bad and with bad cables with no warning in any visible logs.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Sometimes big size and bulkyness maybe good. Once I recovered an old 5(1/4) 10Mb IDE drive that had the 0 track damaged, so fairly unusable, by pushing the heads a few tracks into the plate while holding the stepper motor, making "0" track being in another place of the disk. Crack, crack. Then low-level format.
The new 9.5Mb drive worked like a charm.
I got an old 4Gb drive which had stopped spinning up working again by first putting it in the freezer for 30 minutes (wrapped in an antistatic bag with another plastic bag around that to prevent moisture getting in), then removing it and giving it a couple (okay, more than a couple, because it was fun) of good solid whacks to the side of the drive. Hitting the top or the bottom of the drive wouldn't be a good idea IMO.
I have upgraded my system quite recently, and now have a new Deskstar 180GXP HDD.
Since the first time I booted it up, the drive has kept emitting some kind of high-pitched noise for a few minutes after the spin-up (sometimes it starts couple of minutes later).
The noise sounds like the heads were scraping the platters or something... and when the drive is accessed, it sounds even worse. I usually wait for the noise to stop before using the drive.
I think it might be caused by thermal expansion of the heads/platters. The system is in normal room temperature, but sometimes when it has been lower, I have noticed the sound has been louder. The drive uses fluid-bearing (like almost all of the new ones), so the lowest operating temperature should be 5C (and I have never started it up in lower temp).
The S.M.A.R.T. data doesn't show any significant changes, but I'm a bit worried.
Is this usual? Should I go and buy a new backup drive just in case?
SMART can be helpful (if only to see that you really need to cool your HD better), but I've had harddisks fail without any warning signs whatsoever. A backup strategy (and actually following it) beats SMART any day.
("smartctl" for penguins and "DTemp" for Windows if anyone wants to see what the harddisk is saying for itself.)
...what he did since last night's backup, he's probably hours ahead just restoring from backup and re-creating.
What's that you say? He didn't back up? Life's tough. It's a whole lot tougher if you're stupid.
If his data wasn't backed up, presumably it doesn't matter if it's lost. If it mattered if his data was lost, he should have backed up his data.
Many people have to lose some valuable data to really learn that you need to backup. You can go to the shop and buy a new PC tomorrow morning and it only costs money. Data can be unique and irreplacable.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
Good point. Don't jerk that sharply. Try the drive in baggie in freezer first.
1. Disassemble the drive ...oh, wait. Nevermind.
2. Throw away everything but the platters
3. Dust off your electron microscope
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
Since it's standalone, it can clone a non-bootable drive. It also seems to be able to clone drives that are too damaged to spin up in a PC.
Recent rescues:
60GB 2.5-inch drive would spin up intermittently. Attached it to the external box, where it had the same problem. So I removed the lid, and got the drive to spin up with a thumb twist on the central boss. I got the drive cloned in 20 minutes, and the drive continued to work for another 40 minutes.
Fujitsu with the (in)famous circuit board problem: Got a replacement drive. Cloned an identical functional drive from another machine in the office onto it. Swapped the circuit board on the functional drive to the non-functional one. Drive started, so cloned it to the original functional drive.
The Century unit has been worth its weight in gold to me over the years. The newest one is smaller & lighter. Around $150.
Yesterday, all those backups seemed a waste of pay now my database has gone away oh, I beleive in Yesterday...
(beatles, Yesterday)
All those issues are sooo easily solved with RAID
If an old drive has been running for a long time and is switched of, we've known the bearings to stick (drive wont spin up at all)
The fix is to hold the drive between the palms of your hands (like praying... good analogy :-)) with the axis of the drive between the heals of your hands. Then violently flick your wrists downwards untill your fingertips point to the ground.
The idea is to spin the hard drive casing whilst causing the platters to stay still, so giving the bearings plenty of torque to free them off. It would often be enough to get this thing going again long enough to get the data off it.
But in this case, it sounds like drive mechanics.
Yes this does sound like heads hitting the disk. I've known people physicsly open the drive and poke at the heads (they had skipped off the disk somehow) and get it going long enough to recover data.
Anyway, if the dude has important stuff on this disk I suggest he takes it to a profesional companny who knows what they are doing. You do have backups, dont you?
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
The quote was too expensive UK699 for just family photos.
What was interesting was the noises it made after it came back were very different to those that it made before.
Does any one know what they really do in these labs? Is it worth me opening it to see if they have left disconnected cables?
Neil
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
smartmontools. The daemon can be configured to send an email to an address should a SMART test fail.
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
Another way to do this is to put it on a piece of paper on hardwood desk (the paper to glossy wood friction is fairly low, improvise here) and tap the drive on one corner so as to spin it around in a circle. Use a big desk so it doesn't fly off onto the floor.
Doing it this way can give you a little more instantaneous torque (which is what unsticks the bearings.)
OP: If you get it started even once, get all your data off right then and there - don't think you are going to get another chance because you might not.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
And somebody recommended that, if you felt it was necessary to open the drive, you could build yourself an impromptu clean room quite easily... They recommended that one put on one of those flashlights that strap to your head and put your head and torso in a brand new garbage bag. They argued that not only would it be clean and dust free in there, but that the slight static charge from opening the bag would attract all the dust that came in with us to the bag.
I dunno. I have thought about trying this. Never had an occasion. What about the static from the bag zapping the drive's electronics? If you hold the drive at all times can you be sure you and the drive will be mutually grounded?
My solution required purchasing a software, but $60.00 was well worth the $300 dollars I charged the client. The software rebuilds the FAT on all readable data. www.runtime.org is the site and GETDATABACK is the product.
It's been my experience that hearing a "tock" sound with seagate drives is not a bad thing--Every time I start up my 486 (with a Seagate 428 MB drive) it makes that exact sound, and it works fine.
I love NetHack.
Power down, power up. It's a little bit like a crapshoot:
If you power up and hear 'the click of death', power down, try again.
If you hear a normal drive startup, you should be ok for a few files, the AUTOEXEC.BAT is going to pull out a few files-- maybe get stuck on a bad sector, mash the [I]gnore button repeatedly to skip over them.
When the drive freezes up again, start over.
I was able to salvage data off a IBM StinkPad laptop that way.
First off, freeze it real good. When I first tried this, I didn't get it cold enough, so it died again before I could get much data. I was lucky that my drive gave me multiple chances at it, as usually you only get one.
If freezing it doesn't get it working, drop it onto a hard flat surface. Sometimes this will free up whatever is stuck.
As a last resort, try banging on the drive while the computer is running. You might be lucky and get it spinning again.
If none of the above work, you can either void the warrenty by trying to swap parts with other drives (caution: drives that seem to be identical sometimes are not - match serial numbers and try to get one from the same batch if possible), or you can have him spend a lot of money in a data recovery warehouse. Depends how important the data is.
And I guess if he's willing to spend lots of money to get the data back, you may not want to beat the crap out of the drive to get it working again. If it is just going in the garbage anyways, then anything goes. Just try the freezing first, as it has the best chance of success (in my experience) and does the least damage.
A computer teacher told me about putting the HD in a ziplock bag and putting it in the freezer for a few hours. (Bag protects from condensation) After a few hours, you would take out the hard drive and drop it flat on the ground form about 3-4 feet. This would free the reader heads sometimes. I've tried it on a few frozen drives and its worked about 60% of the time. Sometimes it would just break the drive.
My father's hard drive crashed a few years ago and we decided to send it to some data recovery place. They said all the data was recoverable but wanted an absurd amount to do that. I figured, they got it working, so I said no thanks and asked for the drive to be returned. They sent it back and sure enough, It worked and I got all his data off it. All for the diagnosis fee of something like $100.
it's french, look it up
Did you jiggle the handle? Give it a good whack? Use a large industrial magnet? Rub it vigorously against your dog's back?
A few years back, while working for a third party support firm (read: couple of guys with computer know-how) we sold a bunch of computers. Identical to each other as possible. I remember one day, one of the insurance companies we worked for called us, and asked about drive recovery. He explained what had happened, and we pretty much told him the drive was a gonner, although covered under the hardware warranty.
This was completely unacceptable to the client. So we began to dig out the drive and popped it into our test bed system. Fortunately we didn't hear anything clicking (alla ZIPDrive click-o-death) and so we determined that the controller board had just died. Fortunately for us, we bought the exact same harddrives for everyone in that insurance office. A couple of drive screws, a very delicate ribbon pull, and walla, drive is working again. Pulled the data off of both drives, and was fortunate enough to be able to warranty both drives. We ended up purchasing a third at the same time for just such another occasion. The bonus part for us was that we also got the praise of pulling them out of a crunch (read: lawsuit) at the time, we didn't know until later.
From that point on, anytime we sold multiple computers to a business we always bought two extra harddrives of the same model, just in case. The client paid for one that they kept on site, (for a rush job) and we paid for the other for the not so rushed job. The second part of the newer contract for clients was that anytime we replaced more than three harddrives for the same location, we changed them all out. While the client's balked alittle at the cost, they ultimately saw the benefit of having standardized equipment.
I'd say we performed similar operations about 10 different times between all the drives that we had out there. The clients were happy enough.
harryk
think before you write, it'll save me moderator points.
I had a 1GB SCSI disk on my Sun box that was sitting in an external case for a long time doing nothing except getting banged around as I moved from Michigan to later Tennessee and then Oregon. One day I fired it up on a Sun Sparc ELC, and low and behold, it didn't work, I just got funny errors. It made a strange sound... Fearing the worst, I figured it was just never going to work again. But, like I try with everything else, I gave it a hard WHAP!! I rebooted the Sparc and OpenBSD came right up!! What luck!! It has worked ever since then, for several years...
I had a harddrive once that did that. I wasn't worried about the data and opened it up and gave the head a lil push and it moved. I was able to use the drive for quite some time before enough dust collected. Of course, I was placing the cover back on after I push started it. :)
So is a wallawalla the one who does the one who does?
taxiwallawalla: a prostitute that hangs out by the taxi company office.
I tried the deep freezing method (put the HD in a static free bag, and then inside a ziplock bag) and up it went into the freezer for a day and a half. Didn't work. Tried banging it while it was cold, didn't work. Tried the airdryer bit, didn't work. Tried opening it while inside a brand new trash bag and spun the platter, didn't work. Tried cursing at it, didn't work either! ;)
The only thing I haven't be able to test was swapping the electronics because I couldn't find a suitable donor drive. looked on eBay, googled to no avail. If anyone knows where I can find a Quantum Fireball Plus AS 30GB (QMP30000as-a) for a low price tag, I'd try it and post another follow up.