Creative Data Loss

Freezing hard disks by RonnyJ · 2004-11-14 07:54 · Score: 4, Interesting

Amazingly one guy froze his hard disk in an effort to retrieve files.

I'm surprised to see this - a friend did this successfully to get his hard drive working for a while, and I've seen a fair amount of other people reporting success with it on the internet.

Anyone else?

Hard Drive in the Freezer by vlauria · 2004-11-14 07:54 · Score: 5, Interesting

I actually did that on a WD scsii hard drive last year. It failed on me and had important data on it. I wasn't willing to shill out a few hundred to a few grand to get it fixed, so I found a few articles commenting about how the clicking noise I was hearing was problems related to the mechanics of the drive and there was a chance I could salvage my hard drive by placing in the freezer.

I thought, "Well, the data is lost anyway, so why not?" I put it in a ziplock bag, so not to get the platters all frosty, and left it in overnight. I woke up the next morning and put it back into my computer, and wouldn't you know it, absolutly nothing except for the same clicking errors I heard the day before.

Thanks Internet, you've once again provided me with more information that I really needed.

Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer by Binary+Boy · 2004-11-14 12:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

My first day on my very first tech job - back in the late 80s at a small local shop typical of the day - left me with one indelible impression. My hardware experience was limited at the time, so when they took me back to the repairs room, I made sure to ask what every single thing was, and what it was used for; I got a crash course that day. Anyhow, at some point we get to a place on the wall where there's a nice mini-sized novelty Dodgers baseball bat - solid wood - hanging there, looking well used. I thought it was a joke, and said "what, is that for the really hard cases?" and they proceeded with my training.

My boss took me over to a customer's recently brought in PC, with a big old ugly harddisk just pulled out; said the disk wouldn't spin up, but it wasn't a power or mobo issue, and you could hear the servo in the drive trying a few times before giving up. He told me it was called stiction and was generally very easily solved. He asked me to grab the bat, and give the edge of the drive a few quick raps. At this point I was sure I was being put on, and that my new job was hanging on whether I would do this; I was sure a Candid Camera crew was lurking. Anyhow, after a few reassurances, I gave it a shot; smack, smack, smack! Reinstalled the drive, plugged her in, and nearly as fast as the BIOS could beep we could hear the drive whining up, and sure enough booted and tested out fine!

There were similarly crude techniques for other problems and devices at the time, but that one always stayed with me. It was the day that devices like harddrives were completely de-mystified for me - I had always understood how they worked, but had always held them in some regard as almost mystical, non-mechanical devices. Ever since then they've just been machines to me, with failures that have real, traceable, and even fixable (if you dare) causes.
Re:Hard Drive in the Freezer by vivian · 2004-11-14 14:28 · Score: 3, Interesting

We used to solve this problem with a sharp wrist flick of the hard drive.
Basically you hild the drive vertically in your hand, with the edge facing you.
then do a sharp wrist rotation in the same plane as the drive platter would normally rotate. Better than subjecting all the drive to such a hard shock like youd get clubbing it.

Lost my financials by xant · 2004-11-14 08:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

I once lost a year's worth of gnucash xml data, including all the backups (and gnucash makes plenty--a new one every time you use it!). I promptly used dd /dev/hda1|grep to search for markers that I knew would be in a gnucash file, and with a little shell scripting found the original and every single backup file in deleted space. After determining with a little more fancier grepping which blocks represented my most recently updated file, I recovered that, trimmed off a bit of the filesystem cruft around the edges, and had my file back.

Then I promptly set up a system to encrypt and email myself the most recent file, every day. :-)

(Yes, I'm aware that there are programs that will do the same thing for me.)

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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.

Re:yowsers! by AndyCater · 2004-11-14 08:13 · Score: 2, Interesting

A good colleague - Hi Ryan :) - who builds computers in his spare time left a brand new 80GB hard drive on the roof nd drove off. It bounced a couple of times and got driven over. His mistake was to attempt to send it back for a warranty refund :) Not just women - it happens to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons :)

Not quite creative... by FrostedWheat · 2004-11-14 08:16 · Score: 2, Interesting

I had two IBM death-stars and a Maxtor fail on me last year. The IBM's made that horrible clicky sound they are famous for, and the Maxtor just stopped spinning. I discovered by accident with the first IBM that if I turned it upside down and powered up the machine, I was able to access my data! It worked for the replacement IBM drive a few months later after it failed (bleh), and a Maxtor that had stopped spinning completly.

Doesn't work all the time, but worth a try. Anyone have any idea why it works at all?

Re:Not quite creative... by Cprossu · 2004-11-14 08:26 · Score: 2, Interesting

hmmm havent had luck with upside down drives, but i have had luck with sideways ones... before i try the freezer trick i find that once in a while turning a drive on it's side seems to work... ive recovered data from a 425mb wd and a 1gb maxtor that way....the only thing I can think of that would cause it to work in a wacky position would be wear on the bearings of either the head mechanism or the spindle. Back in the day i remember heated arguments on exactly how a hdd should be mounted, some said horizontal, the circuitry facing the bottom, some others said that hanging it updide down would put less force on the heads (?) and still others hung em sideways. The reason to hang em sideways was that most desktop style cases had areas to mount hdd's next to the floppy drive...anyone else remember the arguments, their reasons, or have any links?

Re:yowsers! by RonnyJ · 2004-11-14 08:20 · Score: 2, Interesting

Man, I don't know what's worse... women drivers or women computer users!

One thing of interest is that the article specifically highlighted the female user - whereas, for men, it was just a user.

The gender of the user in the list was already specified by the 'his/her', so I have no idea why they needed to specifically point out when the user was female.

Okay, user's fault? by SharpFang · 2004-11-14 08:44 · Score: 4, Interesting

I've attached my Amiga harddrive to a PC at work. For a few days I've been succesfully using my home system by mounting the drive under linux as AFFS and then using the mounted directories as volumes under UAE, emulating Amiga just like the one I had at home. Then I got that idea of looking how does Windows see it.
I booted NT, Disk Manager and it displayed a requester with something along this lines:
"The drive contains invalid/corrupt signature and can't be read. Windows is about to write a correct signature. This is an absolutely safe operation and won't change the way of accessing the disk by other operating systems in any way. Do you wish to proceed?".
So, I clicked yes.
Result: 6 hours of recovering of erased Amiga partition table. Absolutely safe my ass, fucking Microsoft liars.

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45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2

Re: Okay, user's fault? by Omniscient+Ferret · 2004-11-14 11:24 · Score: 3, Interesting

When an attempt to reinstall Windows overwrote a Linux partition, I made a script to compare the fsck-recovered files & directories to a Tripwire database.

Nothing irreplaceable was lost, & only a few files - 5% or so? - lost information.
Re:Okay, user's fault? by sparkz · 2004-11-14 11:39 · Score: 3, Interesting

Try letting Windows loose on a SAN - it'll write its crap to the start of every device it finds!
Check WWNs (World-Wide Names/Numbers) of your Windows HBAs before connecting to your SANs, people!

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Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re

Re:The freezer trick does work though by ScrewMaster · 2004-11-14 09:01 · Score: 2, Interesting

In any modern hard drive the R/W head is automatically retracted to a safe area during powerdown and never contacts the platter anyway even when the drive is running (i.e. the Winchester flying head.) If the head ever does touch the platter you've just destroyed part of the platter and maybe the head as well. However, if the drive has seized up, cooling it causes the bearings and spindle shaft to contract and move away from each other to reduce friction. If it's enough that the motor can start turning again you may be able to use the drive for a while.

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The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.

Re:Project E.U.N.U.C.H. by dcam · 2004-11-14 09:28 · Score: 2, Interesting

What about this?.

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meh

Re:Slightly dissapointing by Mac+Degger · 2004-11-14 10:45 · Score: 2, Interesting

Ain't that the truth: I just put back in my SB Live and am selling my brand new audigy 2 zs. The zs sounds nice enough, but it just won't wake up after standby. And that's pretty important seeing as I use my computer as an alarm clock.
And you should check out the Creative forums for a brilliant example of how a company acts when they're product is buggy as hell.

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-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?

Re:Crushed Laptop by chiphart · 2004-11-14 15:01 · Score: 3, Interesting

...when answering the phone in support years ago, I took a call from a user who wanted help replacing her hard drive. After 5-10 minutes of roundabout conversation, she finally admitted that the guys doing work in her building had dropped a cinder block through the ceiling and smashed her server.

No joke.

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...if I wanted to read garbage like that, I'd go to \.

Re:Freezing a hard disk by epine · 2004-11-14 15:42 · Score: 2, Interesting

I had three failed drives back in the heyday of Fujitsu timebombs and IBM deathstars. One we had to send off to data recovery because it failed while it was being reconnected to my backup server. This is true. It was the first time the machine had been power cycled in six months, and when restarted in the location where I had it connected to my backup server, it never spun up. Most of the data from that drive was smeered around the network in various forms and locations, but it was simpler (though somewhat expensive) just to send if off for recovery.

A friend brought me a drive that wouldn't spin up that I managed to spin up just barely long enough to recover the data by power cycling a number of times with different power supplies. The death rattle was noticably increasing as I raced to copy off the files. There was only a few gigs that mattered so I won the race by a few minutes.

The third drive really wanted to spin up. You could feel the platter quiver momentarily on each power cycle. I put it in the fridge wrapped in a thick dishtowel for about four hours. When I took it out of the fridge I had to race to get it installed in the rescue machine before it warmed up too much. It started up. Woohoo! Then it was fine as far as I could tell, but it never started again after that.

I also had a few other Fujitsu's that were rotated out of important functions before they predictably failed. And there was one deathstar drive I installed in a friends machine just before it became widespread knowledge that deathstars sucked, and that drive has never so much as burped. Just as dangerous as the Fuji bombs, a little less predictable.

We had one drive at work that failed within 30 days of being installed. Wasn't either type of notoriously crappy drive, it was just a lemon.

Since that batch in rapid succession, I haven't witnessed a drive failure in two years over some two dozen spindles. Some of those drives in firewalls were from the old less than 10GB era. They made so much spindle noise we recently decided on a mercy killing.

Here's hoping the Seagate 7200.7s are one of the good batches. I've got a lot of them now.

Re:What's wrong with freezing a drive? by spectre_240sx · 2004-11-14 17:00 · Score: 2, Interesting

I've had the same thing happen. Actually all the work for that entire semester of school was on the drive and I almost didn't graduate because of it. (now I'm a bit more careful).

Anyway, I noticed that the deathstar would have problems at certain points and give the well known 4 scrapes and two clicks. After some hard though and a lot of research (a lot pointing to freezing) I ended up waiting till it was having trouble reading and then I twisted it with a decent amount of force. My hypothesis was that if I did this, the drive would realize that the heads were misaligned and reset them. Luckily, it did the trick and after some fsck'ng I was able to get all the data off the drive.

Re:Project E.U.N.U.C.H. by dargaud · 2004-11-14 18:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

Yup, good, but I got them beat for the temperature part, and I was in the freezer myself...

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Non-Linux Penguins ?

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