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Can a Regular Person Repair a Damaged Hard Drive?
MrSeb writes "There's a lot of FUD when it comes to self-repairing a broken hard drive. Does sticking it in the freezer help? The oven? Hitting it with a hammer? Does replacing the PCB actually work? Can you take the platters out and put them in another drive? And failing all that, if you have to send the dead drive off to a professional data recovery company, how much does it cost — and what's their chance of success, anyway? They're notoriously bad at obfuscating their prices, until you contact them directly. This article tries to answer these questions and strip away the FUD."
What has been your experience with trying to fix broken drives?
Sometimes just the controller portion fails. If you remove it and replace it with a working one from a identical drive you're back in business. Only tool needed is a torx driver I believe.
One word: Yes.
Longer version: But it may be more difficult to do nowadays; I don't know. About 7 years ago a family member had a computer with a lot of photos that were, sadly, not backed up. The Maxtor drive had suddenly quit. I was able to eBay another drive with the same model number and swap the boards, and voila! We had a working drive with all of the photos (and other data) intact.
Again, I have no idea how easy that would be to do nowadays... It was hard enough to change boards with my clumsy fingers on a 3.5" drive, let alone a mobile drive.
I broke an external USB hard disk once (it tipped over while running). It cost me AUD $2600 to get it repaired. They got most of the data off; some was corrupted but fortunately nothing important. I take more regular backups now!
I like my coffee the way I like my women - roasted and ground up into little tiny pieces.
Had a disk at work with our sourcesafe database on break. Due to responsibility falling between chairs, there was no backup at all. Sent it to one rescue firm, came back without successful restore, sent it to another one, got more than 99% back, lost nothing important, cost somewhere in the low 4 figures.
With private disks where data rescue is out of the question, I've had good experiences with freezing and in other cases replacing the circuit board. If doing it yourself, always mount RO and have somewhere with enough with enough space to make first a "cp" of selected really important stuff, a recursive "cp" of everything, and last a "dd" or "rescue_dd" of the whole disk. I've had better luck copying files from within a read-only mounted filesystem at first, you are fighting the clock after all.
Maybe the PCB swap used to work, it almost certainly won't work anymore. When a HDD powers on, it needs to load some parameters for the servo system (i.e. positioning the arm) and other tuned parameters for the controller to read back off the disk. These parameters are probably stored in flash memory on the PCB and the parameters will vary from disk to disk. So, parameters for drive A will not work to spin up drive B because of small variances in their manufacturing even if they're made on the same day in the same plant on the same line by the same underpaid employee
You can't swap disks because even if you get a tiny fingerprint on the disk, it's the size of Mt. Everest compared to the distance between the read head and the media. You'll be putting your own home-grown media defects all over it. Forget about getting your files back.
Aside from common firmware related problems (search for "reparing 7200.11" in google for an example), you're not going to have much luck.
The only other thing I've seen work: a guy took his neighbors HDD (which was not responding in Windows) and had to use an oscilloscope to realize the read waveform from the read head was a low amplitude. He built a small in-line amplifier which brought the amplitude back up to spec so the data could be read off. I was impressed.
Source: I have work experience on manufacturing processes for HDDs.
Something on the PCB was cracked. The freezing caused everything to pull back together, and heat separated it. So, bringing it to a lower temperature kept it together longer. Simple enough. Is it a repair? No. Its a workaround. A temporary one.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
The old write-over trick. Yes, what you're doing is actually forcing the drive to remap bad sectors. How reliably it works after depends on what caused the bad sectors in the first place.
You will have great difficulty taking the platters out. The read heads have to be removed without physically coming into contact with the platters. You'll need specialized fixtures and tooling to even begin. If the data is that important then send it to a professional.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
As someone that worked as an engineer in the hard drive manufacturing industry for 15 years I would have to agree, "No."
You might be able to revive a drive if it is a problem with a PCB, but if it is a problem with the disks or heads, forget about it!
Incidentally, a "hard drive crash" used to mean a head touched the disk and physically damaged the head and/or the disk. But for nearly two decades now, heads in hard drives are "contact heads," meaning the smallest part of the gap between the head and the disk is smaller than the mean free path of air molecules. However the heads are "flying" at a fairly high angle of attack, so it is really only the trailing edge of the head that is in contact with the disk at all times. Between that contact head design and auto retracting armatures that pull the heads off the data area of the disks, actual head crashes are extremely rare under normal operating conditions.
I repaired a drive once by overwriting the entire drive with zeroes,
TFA is about a physically damaged drive. (Burnt out component on PCB.) The aim is to recover the data from that.
Your method won't work on that kind of failure, and certainly won't recover any data.
If you do that you want to put a dessicant in the bag with the drive. Otherwise you are just sealing the humid air in.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
One word: Yes.
Longer version: But it may be more difficult to do nowadays; I don't know. About 7 years ago a family member had a computer with a lot of photos that were, sadly, not backed up. The Maxtor drive had suddenly quit. I was able to eBay another drive with the same model number and swap the boards, and voila! We had a working drive with all of the photos (and other data) intact.
Again, I have no idea how easy that would be to do nowadays... It was hard enough to change boards with my clumsy fingers on a 3.5" drive, let alone a mobile drive.
This will not work with many newer drives, especially WD Caviar Black and Blue. There is a firmware chip on the PCB that also needs to be transplanted, and this is tricky even with a Surface mount electronics soldering station, the type that uses channeled hot air.
I've personally used the freezer trick once. Because of the possibility of condensation, I used the fridge first.
There is little possibility of harmful condensation if use a limited version of the freezer trick, and simply suck as much air out of the bag as possible (use a vacuum sealer if available) and then let the disk return to room temperature before opening the bag. You don't NEED to run the disk while you thermally cycle it if the problem is stiction. And there is also always the option of using one of the many waterproof enclosures available on the market, and simply slipping some dessicant packets in there before you start your quest. You could also just put it in a tupperware and seal the hole the cable passes through with silicone, and put the dessicant in there with it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The issue is also what the humidity was in the room in which the head-disk module was assembled/sealed.
Except that hard drives are generally not sealed. They have a filtered breathing hole to exchange air with the outside. Otherwise, the casing would balloon when you took your computer on an airplane or when the drive is shipped via air.
Enigma
I've been a repair tech for the last 10 yrs. (and I don't mean I'm a "I built my own PC, I'm a computer god! I fix my friend/family''s computers" I actually know what I'm doing and have electrical engineering experience) I'd estimate I've seen around a thousand bad hard drives in that time. Of those, I'd say 65% would tap repeatedly, 25% had some io errors but were still working, 8% would sound normal but would never post on the bus, and the other 2% were the other weird issues like chirping or no power at all.
The tappers were very rarely recoverable by me. Every now and then I'd see one that if you powered it up dozens of times, you might get lucky and it would post properly and you could get data from it. None of the other common methods were helpful.
Over 90% of the drives with io errors and slow blocks could be recovered from. Most of those simply required a file level copy from bad drive to good. Most would have a handful of unrecoverable files. Depending on what was lost, an OS reinstall was sometimes required on the new drive, but not usually. A small percentage of them would have a large number of errors and require days to recover, or would fail completely during the recovery. A few of them would look promising but then quickly becomes apparent that almost nothing will be recoverable.
Sometimes a drive would stop responding during recovery and require a break. Trips to the freezer helped on about 30% of the drives. Some drives required numerous trips to the freezer, using rsync to resume copying where it left off last time, a process which could take days but could result in a complete recovery. I pondered ways to cool a drive during the recovery such as using a peltier, but never got anything implemented. I also use ddrescue and another custom script I wrote that works in a similar way, doing block-level recovery while splitting problem areas for smaller recovery chunks. That's useful for windows or other foreign OS where you can't do a file copy. (mac shop here)
I've never dried "drop therapy" or "impact maintenance". I'm sure it could help under specific circumstances like a stuck spindle or loose connection but I've never witness it.
I've done a little bit of onboard controller card ("OBCC") swaps for identical drives where the bad one wouldn't power on at all. About 25% success there. For that reason I tend to keep old tapping drives because their cards can work in dead drives. I assume the tapping drives have head failures, which isn't related to the OBCC. I've talked with multiple data recovery places about this process, and to my surprise every single one of them has told me "that won't work". They usually explain the remaps are stored on the OBCC, which makes sense, but isn't a good excuse not to try when the remaps probably don't account for more than one in a hundred thousand blocks. I think they just want me to send the drive to them.
The sled you place the drive into makes a HUGE difference in recovery. Avoid usb. I don't care if you insist on windows, install a firewire card. Almost all USB bridge chips handle misbehaving drives very badly. Only use one of those little external adapters with the build-on 2ft usb cord on it as an absolute last resort. OWC's "mercury elite aluminum" series are the best (reasonably priced) recovery sled I have found, and I have tried many. USB (39MB/sec, not 36, 26, 16, 12, etc), FW400, FW800, AND esata interface. In the past I used a Granite Digital "fireview", those absolutely rocked for drive recovery (LCD panel with diag menu....) but they stopped making them and they were IDE only. Someone needs to make a modern sled like that for sata please.
As for paid recovery, results seem random. Techs tend to have a recovery place they swear BY, and others they swear AT. But my observation is simply that methods vary and different places handle different problems with varying success. I think many techs' impressions are based on their first few experiences - if good they like, if bad they don'
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Pure snake-oil today. It used to have some merit in the MFM and RLL days, but these are long over. The only thing SpinRite can do today is to cause more damage to the drive if it has mechanical problems. If the drive is mechanically fine, repeated read accessed do exactly the same as SpinRite does, because it does not have any other possibility on modern drives.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Here are two PCB sellers in HK who ship overseas:
http://www.onepcbsolution.com/
http://www.hkmingdi.com/enindex.asp
I found them off the forum of this site:
http://www.deadharddrive.com/
I wrote a short post about it in French, you can probably run it in google-translate. It took me a bit of time to figure out the PCB number on my Seagate drive, which is on the PCB, but on the side facing the disk, so I had to unscrew it to obtain it. (both HK sites were helpful and responded to my e-mails in good English).
http://www.bidon.ca/fr/random/2011-04-12-disque-dur-ressuscite
For fuck's sake, am I the only one who knows how hard drives work?
Actually, it looks more like you are the only one who doesn't know how hard disks work.
Even if a drive were stuffed full of air (pretty sure they're a vacuum),
Actually, the drive does contain air. The HDD's spindle system relies on air pressure inside the disk enclosure to support the heads at their proper flying height while the disk rotates.
it's not high humidity air
Actually, drives usually have tiny "breather" holes to allow air through for pressure equalization if ambient air pressure changes. These also let through along any humidity that is in the air. The only thing that they are designed to hold back is tiny dust particles, which might otherwise cause a head crash. The environment within a hard drive is merely dust free but not a vacuum.