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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 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 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.
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.
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
The place I worked at had pretty good luck with drivesavers. We have sent them hard drives that were damaged in fires (circuit boards completely toasted and platters soaked in water from putting out the fire) and had them recover the majority of the data off from them. It is a high price for the average joe but is worth it when you really need it.
I had a laptop which had been too long in a monsoon climate. I opened the case and took out the drive and gave it the jerky 90 degree turn a few times, quickly plugged it back in and voila it spun up. Not having a replacement drive I just kept using it. After opening the case several times I realized that I could just give the laptop the same spin and the drive would spin up. Eventually I opened the foil cover on the drive case and stuck the drive in a dry place (a ziplock bag with several fresh silica gel packets) for a few days. Last time I tried it was still working.
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.
The first time I did this trick my friend's HD had stopped working, it never spun up and the heads never moved not even a *click-click*. After checking the drive with an o-scope it was determined to be a hardware issue rather than a PCB issue. So we tried dropping it on it's side to dislodge the heads but it didn't work. So as a last ditch effort I suggested that we open it up and manually free the heads or spin the platters. Since I had disassembled many dead HDs for the nice magnets on the head arms it was decided that I would be the one to do it. Once I got it open we discovered the heads were tightly wedged up onto the platter spindle! The head arm had somehow passed the stop and gotten stuck. Gently twisting the platters (put a screw into axis of the spindle and twisting it with a screwdriver) while pushing the arm back away from the spindle dislodged it. After checking to make sure that all parts were moving freely and that everything was secure we powered it up and bingo! Kinda neat watching a HD operate. Put the lid back on and he backed up all his data and eventually used that drive for another two years problem free! Pretty amazing since the whole operation took place on his bedroom floor not a clean room in sight.
NarratorDan
"If you're not confused by quantum mechanics, you really don't understand it." - Niels Bohr
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
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.
We've all seen the pictures... the distance between the read head and the platter compared to a grain of dust, a smoke particle, a human hair etc.
:) He had 'demo' computer and used a harddrive with some bad sectors on it and the top cover removed and a piece of clear perspex in its place. Despite all my suggestions that it wouldn't work once it had been exposed to the air and dust in our lounge room, it worked just as good as it did before he pulled the top off.
The nifty thing is, the drives spin fast enough that with some luck all this stuff will just fly outwards and get stuck in the filter before it comes into contact with the heads.
My Dad used to teach basic competency in word processing and spreadsheet use etc (back in the day... 80286 and wordperfect 5.1
I think they were actually repaired. While dd-ing, I observed "reallocated sector count" and "current pending sector count" counting down synchronously. After that, the harddisk was defect free according to SMART. Only the "worst" values for said fields indicated that there had been a problem. AFAIK "current pending sector count" is the number of sectors which the drive couldn't read but has not yet tried to overwrite. When the overwrite succeeds (the block is readable afterwards), then the block is removed from both the pending list and reallocation list. Otherwise it stays in the reallocation list and will not be tried again (no longer pending). The dd wipe gives the disk a chance to ignore the previous content and perform the write test on the block. It never does that on its own because the block might be recoverable under different conditions.
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.
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.
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.