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?

Comments

Freeze first, then

[SpaceLifeForm]

try finding an identical drive and swap the electronics.

Re:Freeze first, then

[kableh]

I had a WD 120GB die on me, and I'm positive it was the controller board (pulled the board off and it looked like a burnt trace to a flash chip). I swapped boards with a friend who ordered the exact same drive the exact same day, same rev number, same model number, same build date. Didn't work.

Then again, I've gotten an older laptop drive to work again by swapping boards. But the anecdotal evidence suggests your parent poster was correct about newer drives. I'd add that I did all of the above in the lab at my employer, on an anti static work mat, with an anti static wrist strap.

Dead eh.

[GigsVT]

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.

dd_rescue is great for copying from flaky drive

[Danny Rathjens]

dd_rescue

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:

• Buy new 250GB drive(WD 7200rpm 8MB cache for $160 from Best Buy(stupid $90 rebate)
• fdisk, mkfs, mount new drive on /mnt/new
• dd_rescue -A /dev/hdc1 /mnt/new/home.ext3 (-A so it fills in any errors with zeroes)
• wait many hours(did my taxes, :)
• fsck -p /mnt/new/home.ext3
• mount home.ext3 /mnt/loop -o loop
• cp -a /mnt/loop/* /mnt/new