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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?
Yes, this frequently works at making failing disks "work again" -- as the manufacturer test sequences and/or simply zeroing the drive gives the drive a chance to find and mark all the bad failed blocks as bad, and the remaining blocks are all the ones that didn't fail and so the disk keeps working for a few more years. I've used this a half dozen times at work.
Of course, this is to make a failing disk "work again", it doesn't help with recovering existing data.
The first thing I'll try with a failing disk is to setup a file by file mirroring program (robocopy is one cli program I use a lot) and set it's "retries" to a moderately high number, like 5 or 10 or 20. Even though you are getting read errors, there are a class of problems where occasionally the read will work, and so each time you try and "rsync" the disk, you get more and more of what's there, till you have a mostly complete copy of the data. This is the same method that some enthusiast utilities use (like grc's disk recovery program, iirc).
I've personally used the freezer trick once. Because of the possibility of condensation, I used the fridge first. I don't recall if I had to use the freezer, but I know I would not have left it in the freezer long (metal transfers heat fast, so it doesn't need to be deep freezed, just a bit colder than the fridge), maybe 5 minutes max, and I recall thinking that I'd end up putting it inside an anti static bag or something with an elastic closing the bag on the cables ... so that the amount of condensation would be limited, either that or run the dehumidifier and/or AC really hard first so that my apt was at low humidity. Definitely would not try it in the middle of a humid summer. Better to wait till winter and turn up your heating system and open your windows so the humidity drops really really low. That's always another option (for those of us that live far enough north), take the system into the chilly cold arid garage so the freezer trick doesn't result in lots of condensation.
Of 5 drives that were failing, 3 I recovered by "retry reads over and over", and 1 I recovered using the freezer trick.
I have one more left that I need to try a "platter swap" with an identical working model number using the "bathroom cleanroom technique". But I'm not looking forward to that, getting the platters out without scratching them on the heads is going to be a massive bitch. I think I'll practice on a few old 9GB drives before I try it with my failed 120GB drive. (I've had it sitting around for forever waiting for me to find the time to do it, I don't actually still use drives that old.)