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A Walk Through the Hard Drive Recovery Process
Fields writes "It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered, but few people actually use a recovery service because they're expensive and not always successful. Even fewer people ever get any insights into the process, as recovery companies are secretive about their methods and rarely reveal any more information that is necessary for billing. Geek.com has an article walking through a drive recovery handled by DriveSavers. The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process. From the article, "'[M]y drive failed in about every way you can imagine. It had electro-mechanical failure resulting in severe media damage. Seagate considered it dead, but I didn't give up. It's actually pretty amazing that they were able to recover nearly all of the data. Of course, they had to do some rebuilding, but that's what you expect when you send it to the ER for hard drives.'" Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters, too.
A hard drive shaped freezer.
"It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered"
[Citation Needed]
Wouldn't backing your data up be cheaper?
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Having read the article, I can't help but think that it doesn't really read like an article of "Oh, this happened, and then this happened" especially considering that it is about hard driver recovery.
:(
Short of "sending in a zip lock satchel" and "using methodology" what exactly did this article cover in regards to recovering hard drive information? Not a lot. Sorry to be a bit of a drag here, but considering that the company was mentioned more than once, with links and so forth, it just made the whole thing read like a glorified infomercial with the added bonus of being surrounded by advertising.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
The summary says Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters too. and I did. It is pure advertising. Zero facts, instead boring emotional angle with mom and pop hugging as all their iMac data got recovered.
That stuff on the front page? Bahh! Instead of 15 modpoints twice a week give me 5 article mod points to vote this one down to -1 overrated.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
I'm sorry, but that was the most content-free load I've read on /. in a while. And no, I'm not new here - I just usually don't RTFA. ;-P
Video of the talk:
Defcon 14 - Hard Drive Recovery
Basically it talks about making a clean box and how to change out the read heads or the PCB from a drive that is the exact same model. Really cool stuff!
Recovering hard drives is a 3 step process:
1) Mumbo Jumbo
2) Put drive platter into otherwise identical drive
3) proprietary secret stuff (sound like they used Windows to get the data off and then burn to DVDs.
Now you don't have to read the article.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
IME flash drives don't fail catastrophically, they go bad one part at a time, and generally only writes fail, you can still read without problem. I've seen a few drives fail all together, but they stopped registering as USB devices all together. The same recovery techniques can be used, and they need not be expensive. There's MagicRescue, and foremost that kick absolute ass. Free recovery software rawks.
www.isoHunt.com
And likewise, if you have data you need to get rid of, how easy/hard (compared to magnetic HDDs) is it to permanently blast data off a flash drive if you don't want the data found?
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
There's tons of information out there. We'll omit details about how your data should have been backed up. The rest of it's pretty simple, and it depends on your filing system, but marginally.
1) find out what's wrong with the drive (logic board or drive motor board)
2) get an identical drive; put the old platter assy into the new drive's guts, or just move the good drive's electronics over
3) use a sector editor to find the FAT, journal, or whatever, or restore the MBR and use your fav OS (Kunbuntu, here)
4) painfully gather files (actually, go out back while they're retrieved for you)
5) collect fat (as in BIG) check with lots of kudos, thank yous, and appreciation
6) repeat
You don't have to backup, as long as you have a fat wallet.
p.s. TFA really does sound like a commercial.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I've done a few platter swaps and have had good luck if I can find the right donor drive. So far I've gotten data off most of the disks I've tried but sometimes the recovery rate can be as low as 25%.
I recommend that people buy drives in pairs. That way you have a good drive to use as parts once the data has been moved off to a newer drive.
I do repairs in my house so there isn't a clean room in sight.
If the board is fried, a board swap tends to do the trick but the bad sectors are stored on the board so the mapping will result in some bad data.
I start with the hard drive in the freezer (using a external firewire case) trick first. That tends to get noisy bearings about 3 hours which is enough to copy data over.
If that doesn't work, I do a platter swap. I disassemble the drive and I've found that normal printer paper works great for lifting out the platters with out scratching them. Just make sure you put them in the donor drive in the same order and don't flip them. Once the platters are in, it appears that the drives have a few days to live before they stop working. With head crashes, you might want to consider only putting the good platters in. I have yet to find a good cleaning solution so with crashes you have a very limited amount of time but head crashes seem to be rare these days.
Once you can read the disk, use DD to copy the data to a new disk. Don't try to mount it to look for a specific file unless you only need one file and mount it read only. For data file recovery, I use a mac program Data Rescue by Prosoft which is good except it sometimes is too good and pulls out the internals like pictures out of flash and office docs.
If your going to do this at home, take apart a few older disks first. Keep in mind they designed these things to be assembled quickly so there is a way to retract the heads completely off the platter so hunt around for it. There are some people who use vacuum cleaners to try to remove dust and others will use a shower to steam up a bathroom and wait until the steam clears with the hope of taking the dust away. I just open the drives on my computer desk.
A little light on content as others mentioned :(
:( One head crashes and causes a chain reaction after the aluminum shavings clog the filters or interfer with the others. Luckily the software forced you to backup on the removeable platter each day. Only loss was a couple software mods (that the writer had a copy of) cause the system platter backup was kinda old, had to added back in.
:)
Nothing as interesting as the crash on our old mini-computer ages ago either. One of those 12" drives with 4-5 platters had a head crash and repurposed itself into a metal lathe quick nicely one weekend. At least it didnt burn down the building but it left several pounds of aluminum confetti all over the computer room after it blew out the filters on the drive. It seems you just can't filter air by the pound
Needless to say, that had a zero chance of recovery. Only time a insanely overpriced maintainence agreement ever paid off...Drive was almost $20k to replace plus cleanup and setup on 200lb drive.
Only other one that might have required a recovery service turned out to be electronic issue only and i sacificed a matching computer for the HD circuit board to repair the 'server' from a remote warehouse. Only some memos and spreadsheets and stuff and not worth the huge quote for recovery so i got to try it and fixed it the next day
PS. always found it interesting the the edge speed was the same as current drives at around 105mph. The head hit a platter going between 50 and 105 mph.
This article is such a blatant fake / advertisement, how could the moderators let that be published on the front page ?
As noted by many, no real technical information. Whoever wrote it might have tried to sound 'grassroot', but the whole thing still reads very much like a marketing material... 'Be sure to visit the Museum of Disk-asters too' ? Especially when such page contains nothing but marketing stuff ? Give me a break !
And how many people would go pay 2000$ just to get back some music and photos of the family ???
Slashdot needs a system so that people can RATE THE MODERATORS, because anyone who lets something such blatant fake-grassroot marketing material on the front-page should not be in that position.
The whole thing is just an insult to our intelligence
I had a drive with a mechanical problem that wouldn't spin up. It didn't have anything critical but it did have my last x weeks worth of software downloads which would have been a pain to re-download. I tried banging it, freezing it, you name it. What worked in the end was making sure it was upside down when it was powered up and giving it a little tap to get it spinning. Got it running for 24 hours - long enough to get all my data off. About 200Gb. Obviously a mechanical failure and obviously pure luck that I got it working again.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Needless to say, I was disappointed with the experience and in hindsight we should have never spent several thousand dollars to get almost nothing back.
Now I have my dad's computer hooked up to an external hard drive using Time Machine. Unless our house burns down, which would be far more catastrophic than a hard disk failure, I don't anticipate having ever to do that again.
Sorry if this comes off as overly negative, but as this article essentially an advertisement and people need to know customer experiences.
Assuming, of course, that if hiding the data is that important, the cost of a flash drive is a sacrifice you're willing to make.
"Why are you watching the washing machine?"
"I love entertainment, as long as it's clean"
It's well known that failed hard drives can be recovered, but few people actually use a recovery service because they're expensive and not always successful
... much like this article.
.. err .. mechanical and electrical? You mean the reciprocator was caught in the optical refraction? Now that's worth $1500.
Yep. The article helpfully points out the $1500 charge for a medium sized hard drive. It might have been more interesting if the article demonstrated a time when it wasn't successful.
Even fewer people ever get any insights into the process, as recovery companies are secretive about their methods and rarely reveal any more information that is necessary for billing.
So, just like this article? Got it. Something involving putting old platters into new drives by people wearing bio-hazard suits.
The recovery team did not give away many secrets, but they did reveal a number of insights into the process.
Wowsers. You can say that again, but insights? I defy anyone to name any insight that wasn't in their last press release
[M]y drive failed in about every way you can imagine. It had electro-mechanical failure resulting in severe media damage.
Doesn't "elctro-mechanical failure" describe anything that could be wrong with a device that is
It's a good thing space on the interwebs is free. Someone should run this past the kids that edit airline magazines.
Have a look at this photograph.
The chip on the left is memory. That's where your data hides. The chip on the right is the memory controller. If that chip fails, but the memory chip is intact, your data may be recoverable.
Surface mount chips are hard, but not impossible to swap out.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
That is a nice theory but there is no oil in the bearings of a Hitachi (formerly IBM) drive. They ride on an air bearing. I have heard of faulty temperature sensors being reset through the freezing method, but whatever the reason I have seen the freezing method suggested by several sources. For me I believe that it has to do with moving the drive. Shorts or binds will often be resolved by moving the drive around.
When I worked for IBM I did a fair share of data recovery. My favorite drive that I saved was a laptop drive with a stiction problem. It would get caught during spin-up. I put my ear to the drive and would listen to it and kept rebooting and shaking the drive until it finally got past the rough spot. Recovered all the engineers data who was extremely happy he didn't have to waste $500 bucks with Ontrack.
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So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
I found an unusually large proportion of the follow up comments here to be (+1, Informative) and (+1, Interesting). TFA itself was total infomercial-tastic tripe, however.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Apparently not. The flash array is in the middle of a silicon die and protected with a layer of oxide and epoxy. The pins that come out of the chip packages go directly to some control circuitry and not the flash cells themselves. The flash cells are isolated unless the control circuitry actively tries to read them. So if you were to short all of the pins on the flash chip with the power off the data will still be intact.
If you do put your flash drive through the washer / pool / toilet you should try to soak it in distilled (not deionized or spring) water for a while and then let it dry on a windowsill for a few days. As long as you don't plug it in until it dries it should work just like new. This is the same process used during manufacture of most PC boards with water soluble flux, so it's likely that your drive has already been dunked anyway.
The same recovery techniques can be used, and they need not be expensive.
Not really. Software tools such as the one you mentioned, Magic Rescue, are for dealing with deleted files or corrupt file systems. That applies to both flash and magnetic drives.
But for it to work on a magnetic drive, the drive pretty much has to be functional electrically and mechanically. Most drives like that would work after reformatting.
For that software to work, the interface to the computer has to work, the spindle servo has to work, the head positioning system has to work, the heads have to be okay and have a working connection, and at least the read electronics has to work. A drive isn't really very dead if software can control it and read from it.
A failure of some part of the drive hardware is likely to require repair or substitution of what's broken. I was disappointed that the article provided almost NO useful details on that.
If the electronics has failed, substituting the circuit board from another drive of the same type seems like one thing that would be relatively easy.
Those in the know should easily be able to tell if a head or connecting cable has become open-circuited. I suspect that cracked copper in the head flex cable is a fairly common problem. It is likely the as it first fails, a connection is lost more towards one end or the other of head travel. If one can run the electronics in a sort of diagnostic mode (to avoid aborting on errors), I suspect that a bit for bit copy can be attempted by physical location. That's likely what they're talking about when they mention making an image to recover from.
If the heads/cables are trashed and not easily repaired in place, swapping the platters into another drive (after removing any debris) is one of the more extreme measures.
There are probably alternate test-jig type fixtures available to substitute for normal drive electronics. I wouldn't be surprised if the most extreme tools allowed varying read-head preamp parameters and finely adjusting head positioning parameters.
It's kind of sad that so much information is unavailable to most of us. With full schematics, details of drive firmware etc a skilled technician can do component level repairs. People used to laugh at tv repairmen when sets came along where they'd just swap individual circuit boards instead of finding the bad component. But that's the sort of thing we now see most of the time with our computers and consumer electronics, if they get "fixed" at all. Most of the so called repair people know very little about electronics. It's understandable that the low replacement cost of much electronics has made labor-intensive repairs cost prohibitive, but I'd still like to see schematics available for everything.
It's sad that we've not only lost the majority of manufacturing jobs, but much of the service side too as a result of the "if it breaks buy a new one" way of doing things.