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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
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.
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
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.
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
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.