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Can a Regular Person Repair a Damaged Hard Drive?

Posted by Soulskill on from the macgyver-need-not-apply dept.

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?

4 of 504 comments (clear)

  1. One word by mknewman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No.

    1. Re:One word by Voyager529 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Incidentally, a "hard drive crash" used to mean a head touched the disk and physically damaged the head and/or the disk.

      ...and today, "my hard drive crashed" can mean basically anything. I can't count how many times I've heard someone say "my hard drive crashed" only to have their response to my question of "how do you know" sound something like, "well, when I go to 'my documents, Word doesn't load" or some other similar error where the hard disk is clearly not to blame. I tried educating people on the actual meaning of the term, but it seemed a losing battle, so now "my hard drive crashed" generally translates to "something is broken", unless it's a fellow computer tech who I'm certain knows what an actual hard disk crash looks like.

  2. PCB swap is cheap, quick, and often works by thatseattleguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In the very limited (3) cases that I've had to try and revive a client's dead desktop drive, replacing the PCB board from an identical model - usually purchased cheaply, used or new, online - has always worked.

    The other advantage of this approach is that if the first drive becomes revivable, even a time, you now have a second same-capacity drive to transfer the data to (using intermediate storage media if in fact it was the PCB that was the problem and you can only get one drive working at a time).

    If it doesn't work, you're no worse off and still have a replacement drive to load data from your (hopefully recent) backups.

  3. you must be new here by anarcat · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Regular person? This is slashdot, there are no "regular persons" here.

    --
    Semantics is the gravity of abstraction