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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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've done the brain swap successfully before (about 10 years ago). I have heard anecdotally since then that this may not work with more modern drives that may store calibration data in non-volatile storage on the electronics board. I can't confirm if this is true.
I've never tried freezing one. I think I'd try a brain swap first, as it's unlikely to cause physical harm. I can't say the same for the freeze operation for sure. If you do freeze it, put a bunch of dessicant (silica gels) in with the drive for a few days beforehand. You don't want moisture in with the drive freezing, expanding and damaging something.
-- There is no truth. There is only Perception. To Percieve is to Exist.
"Scratching" the platters is a non-issue. Most of the time they are made of polished Al and the magnetic element on them is pretty tough. What you have to worry about is everything from dust to finger prints. A single particle of dust in the path of the head is like a tree infront of a car.
Carpe meam simiam!
I would consider this to be a last-resort. And an expensive one considering you're going to destroy another hard drive to attempt recovery of the bad one.
I've done just this before myself and had hit-or-miss luck with it. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. But this was 15-20 years ago. Dust was a problem, but if you did it in a really clean environment and were careful it would minimize the risk. I'd never try it with a modern hard drive unless I had some sort of clean-room with HEPA air filtration quality. Things are just too small now-a-days.
Data recovery companies do basically this with dead hard drives, but they've got the equipment to pull it off. Just by opening the drive itself, you could do enough damage to prevent them from getting anything off of it.
It may be irrelevant anyway. By the sound of the noises the drive was made, I would guess the damage has already been done.
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.
I can say authoritatively that swapping boards on newer drives does NOT work - I used to do tech support for Western Digital. The problem becomes that a chip on the board holds the other half of the calibration data that's embedded on the platter at factory low level format time. So in a sense every drive is individually tuned to a point where only that controller card will work with that body. I've heard about it being done successfully with drives having the same model, sub model, firmware rev, very close s/n's, etc. I wouldn't reccommend it at all. Also if you brain swap the drive, you lose all warranty on both the drives (yes they can tell). I agree with the first poster, get a shovel and bury it because it's dead or send it out for data recovery. If the data means ANYTHING to you then don't try home methods, they're liable to get you into a far worse situation drive-wise.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
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.
Unfortunatly you're wrong. I've done board swaps on at least two dozen drives in the last five years, mostly antique Seagate Barracuda (swapped at least 8 of those I can think of off hand), but the line up included everything from a Micropolis full-height MFM through a slew of more modern 2-20Gb IDE drives..
Success rate? 100% on the Barracudas, 100% on the MFM and RLL volumes, probably only 60% on the rest. A lot of the drives will not tolerate a logic board swap, but its always worth a shot if you're not going to warranty RMA the drive. (One of the successes was a recent vintage Western Digital 20G drive, which is why I was compelled to respond)
Of course, I've also de-stuck probably 50 drives with the old "power it up, tap it against the desk during POST" trick.. That nearly always works when it won't spin up.
PLEASE NOTE:
My success rate is tempered by having 15 years of experience. My first recovery efforts were on Seagate 10 meg drives WHEN THEY WERE NEW. Fully 20-30% of the drives I come across are UNRECOVERABLE by any means you or I can do. Send the damn drive to Ontrack if you value your data.
.sig: Now legally binding!
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.
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.
smartmontools. The daemon can be configured to send an email to an address should a SMART test fail.
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
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.