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

if it's the Circuit board

[jaredmauch]

(Which i've seen before), you find an identical drive and swap it. Now the problem i've seen is that the PCB's have gotten more and more reliable over the years. Most drive failures I've seen recently are all physical failures inside the sealed environment. Depending on how the drive stopped working pray for no physical damage.

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.

Re:Try this.

[DaoudaW]

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.

A comment on freezing.

[stvangel]

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.

Re:Give it a whirl

[narratorDan]

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