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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?
No.
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.
Don't ask me how, but I had a failing drive that couldn't even manage to be on for 30 seconds before being unreadable. Since I was curious, as a control, I first let the drive sit at room temperature for an hour. Afterwards, again, only 30 seconds of read time. I then put it in the freezer for an hour, and was able to read for 10 minutes, just enough time for the data I needed. I have no idea what actually happened, and am still skeptical to attribute the success to the freezer, but I did get what I wanted.
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.
... a regular person.
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.
I used to do precisely this kind of work for a local repair shop. For problems with the motor or the actuator, the freezer trick can work to successfully power the drive up and maybe get some data off of it -- it does not "fix" the drive. For problems with a physically damaged PCB, of course replacing the PCB works -- again, though, the good practice is to use this only to power the drive long enough to get your data off of it. Moving the platters is pretty much an impossibility without a clean room and some specialized equipment. I have seen "percussive adjustment" get one to power up when everything else fails, but it's by no means the option of first resort. Never heard of placing one in the oven, but I wouldn't try it.
We had to send off for professional services in about 10% of cases, and the success rate was pretty bad. I think it was somewhere around $200/hr., but this was on the order of ten years ago, so take that with a grain of salt.
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.
I've tried the freezer trick to help what sounded like an ailing bearing , but with limited success. No amount of freezing seemed to help. To make things worse, when I took the drive out of the freezer, moisture started condensing immediately on the cold PCB. I tried to place it on a sponge to help sop up the water, but I can't imagine this helped the drive at all.
I have some friends that swear by this, but I am extremely doubtful especially because of the condensation problem. I feel like this is an a apocryphal bit of "knowledge" that has been passed down from a time when drivers were larger, slower and had less precise bearings. I can imagine that on a big old drive freezing the drive *may* have helped. But then again, perhaps it's something like throwing a pinch of spilled salt over your shoulder or touching wood--something your grandma told you to do, but doesn't actually do anything.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Just 3D print whatever new part you need. A new read/write head? Just pop some plastic in the 3D printer and print one out. Then head over to the clean room and the tool box and jigs and use your dexterity and skill to change the head. Bad IC somewhere? 3D print out a new chip. Yes, 3D printing is the future!!
I took my hard drive to the Geek Squad and they wanted $500 to send my hard drive away to get the data.
I yelled at them and I told them that was robbery. Asked for the manager. But, when I was leaving one of the Geeks told me a secret.
He said just go home and drill a hole in the hard drive and then set it on top of your new hard drive with the hole facing down. All the data will just pour out to your new drive.
It didn't work for me, but maybe I didn't do it right?
As far as condensation, perhaps it depends on the climate? A freezer-temp piece of metal in Arizona doesn't pick up much condensation, but one in Georgia will sweat all over the place.
I do agree that stories of it actually fixing modern drives are probably either apocryphal or obsolete.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Some HD problems (stuck platters so it doesn't spin up) are user-fixable. Most are not. There is a syndrome called "sticktion" where the read/write heads settle on the platters when shut off (most modern drives will elevate the heads when shut off, but some, including many older drives, do not). Because the platters and heads are so flat, they mechanically weld themselves together over time. To fix this (a technique I have used often in the past), you need to remove the drive, and then snap rotate it on the plane of the platters, so that the momentum of the platters trying to counter rotate against the impetus of the rotational momentum you are applying to the drive will break the "weld" loose. If you then quickly re-install the drive and turn it on, it will most likely spin up and continue to operate without problems. Other failure modes include head "crashes", spindle bearing failures, drive motor failures, controller circuitry problems (bad electronic components), and mechanical breakage of connectors, solder joints, etc. These typically are not user repairable.
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
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.
I haven't had a disk crash for a long time, but it used to be that when a disk crashed while reading, I could still connect it to a 486 and read all the data on it. I guess the slower computer doesn't stress the disk as much.
This was during the IDE days. Now it's all SATA, so I threw the 486 away.
There often was data corruption, but without a reliable backup it was the best thing to have.
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)
It was a while ago now, but back in 1994 I used to regularly swap out PC bits. I found a couple of hard drives in the bottom of my drawer that had been there a while - not sure how long. One worked fine, the other one wouldn't spin. A colleague recommended a hitting it with something. I rapped it sharply on the desk sideways on a couple of times, put it back in the PC and low and behold it was fine and then worked okay for at least the few months I noted it. The thought was that the grease was holding it in position, which I had broken with the blow.
I've replaced burned out PCB's a few times on critical data drives, but it requires finding another drive of the exact same model and if possible nearly the exact same production year and month and sacrificing it. Once the PCB is swapped out and the drive is accessible, get the data of of it immediately. I normally use Ghost to clone the drive and then wipe it before disposing of the previously failed drive.
If anything else goes wrong with a drive I'd either just toss it or send it to a data recovery professional. As has been stated before, opening the case requires a clean room.
This goes back about 10 years. There were fuses on the PCB, little surface mount affairs that look like a 1206 resistor. So this goes back to the days of the bad capacitors, and sometimes power supplies would fail explosively and take out the entire electrical system of the PC. I guess the PS must have gone out of regulation when the capacitors fail, who knows.
The HD just didn't spin up or show up in the BIOS when taken to a new PC. I just traced out the PCB and found the open fuse and changed it. There you go, HD spins up again.
That was my boring story for today.
Mostly random stuff.
My first job in "the industry" was in a PC repair shop in 1991. Back in those days, we had a huge crop of bad Seagate 40MB (yes, that's "mega" children) hard drives. The usual problem was that the spindle had frozen up, and if we took the circuit board off and gently tapped the spindle, you could often (about 75% of the time) get the drive to start spinning again long enough to get your data off.
Hard drives have gotten a lot more reliable and a lot smaller since then. I don't know whether this would be a wise thing to do with a modern hard drive.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
When I was in college some friends came to me with a dead computer. It didn't recognize the drive so I pulled it out, hooked it up to mine and powered it up. I had it in my hand and heard it clicking and clicking like it was stuck. The jdrive was dead so I figured what the hell so I hit it hard with the heel of my other hand. It was kind of funny the click click, bam! Whiiiiiiirrrrr sound it made. I took the disk back, told them it was working but likely not for long and to get a new drive and copy everything ASAP. My hand hurt for a while though
Unrelated story, years later one of our dev servers died. Broken raid, no backups, second disk died after a while. The IT crew didn't monitor the dev servers as often as production. We lost months of work and ended up shipping the disks to a professional recovery service. They charged about $10k IIRC but got most of the data out. Handling of the DEV servers changed afterwards.
In some cases, the problem is not in the drive but in the on-board controller circuitry. If you're desperate, and you have a 100% identical drive, you can swap the controller boards and that will often work.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
First of all anyone who said No is wrong. You can attempt to fix a hard disk using several methods.
The first idea is to replace the controller on the back, this would be the PCB, as long as you have a controller of the same revision you can swap them. This wont always work but I've seen it unbrick a good number of drives.
The second method I've seen work is to take a molex connector cable to serial, it attaches to the four little pins on the back of the drive and allows firmware access through a terminal program like hyper terminal or minicom. I've seen drives corrupt there firmware and this is really the only way to get into the settings and play with it, you can sometimes unlock a drive and get it spinning up, however copy the data off ASAP and swap the drive, it's at it's lifes end.
The last method I've used and had work is to solder the controller from one hard disk to another using a flywire setup. This is a hack job and it is really a last attempt, you can take wire and solder it from the pins of one controller to the pins of another controller that is working. I've only ever had one disk kick over this way but I was able to copy data from it.
Apart from all the garage hacks I just talked about there is alway the manufactures tools, they usually will allow you to download a disk image full of apps that can talk to the drive and try to recover it. If you don't care about the data you can always try a LOW level format, not a format! This is a special kind of high risk format, it will nuke the drive and if you get a power outage can brick the drive but again might work.
For going all of that, hard disks are cheap just buy a new one.
What has being 'regular' got to do with fixing hard drives?
I have dissected a few hard drives, but have never been able to repair one -- and I have repaired lots of things unrepairable. The problem is finding the failure point. As the article said, if there is a component failure on the drive circuit board, AND IF YOU CAN FIND IT, then you might have a chance. However, most electronic components silently give up the ghost with no trace of having failed. The exception shown in the article really is an exception and if there is that much damage to a component I would suspect other damage to nearby components or even to traces on or within the board.
On the other hand taking a hard drive apart is a wonderful study in just how well these things are made. The precision with which they are made would be the envy of many old time watch makers. It does take some special tools, however. A good set of strange driver bits really are needed and often include what are called security bits. Inside are lots of cool things like high power magnets and voice coil assemblies to move the heads and the amazingly delicate flying heads themselves. Although it is fun to take one to the range for target practice, you can also have a lot of fun just taking one apart.
Now, the other reason to take one apart is to be REALLY sure you don't leave any recoverable data on the platters. Some of the platters are actually glass and by wrapping them in a few sheets of newspaper and pounding with a hammer for a while you can produce a nice pile of powdered glass that I doubt even NSA could recover data from. In any case with the platters removed and destroyed the data is really gone.
I've had this program save my butt more than once, even when a drive "starts making bad noises." My theory is that it is very gentle on the head positioning mechanicals inside the HD. So while normal file system operations to read files off a HD will fail, since it sends the heads all over that place, dd_rescue succeeds since it's only moving the heads one cylinder at time.
Backup
Fixing a broken hard drive is quite easy. Simply restore from your backup to a new working drive. While you're at it, get a higher capacity drive as the prices will have dropped and the capacities will have improved. ...ah, you do keep daily backups, right? If not then you're one of those people who hires people like me to recover your data. It's expensive. Making backups is a lot cheaper.
Hard drives are really, really finicky. What works for some might not work for others, even if they are encountering the same problem. For instance, sticking a drive in the freezer worked for an older drive I was repairing for my mom but not for a former girlfriend's drive that, all things considered, had the same issue. I also once owned a Dell DJ (piece of shit, if anyone is considering getting this) that used a full-height 1.8" hard drive whose actuator would frequently stick; dropping or tapping it worked every time (to everyone else's curiosity), but has never, ever worked for any other drive that seemed to have the same issue.
I think you're pretty much fucked if your SSD starts going south, which is unfortunate. Thankfully, backups are easier to make these days.
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
I've replace the PCB before to get at damaged platters, but both times I was lucky enough to have *exact* same model and run drives around, it typically doesn't work otherwise.
I've had luck with freezing a drive once, though I was only able to recover a few files before it gave up the ghost completely (luckily, expecting that, I'd created a script to hunt for and copy the important files before I ever took the drive out of the freezer.
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Some years ago, my 40GB Maxtor drive stop working. No boot, no partition table, etc... So i bought a new drive and tried to copy the data, after many attemps, and all hope lost. I took a piece of wood and used it as a mallet, and gave to the drive a good round of hits, then connected it again and it worked. I copied 20GB of my data and threw the drive into a wardrobe and never used it again. I forgot to mention that I lifted the drive cover a bit, by unscrewing partially to give a gap that allowed to lift the cap a bit, this was another rumour myth that i was hearing about drive recovering. I don't know what make the reading possible, but i can say that i recovered my data.
We fixed a drive by trading the pcb with another *IDENTICAL* drive (same rev of board etc)..
The funny part was that when we went to recover the files they desperately needed back from that drive, all we found were shortcuts to a network drive, where the files had been safe and sound the entire time.. The user just had no idea that they hadn't lost their files..
Data recovery centers have dust-free environments when removing the platters from hard drives. Air contamination can easily cause data corruption. Sure you can try fixing your broken hard drive, but you'll most likely lose all your data in the process. If you have critical information that you don't want to lose, just use a professional. I switched to Gillware for my clients. Their prices are some of the cheapest I've seen in a while. Was always a fan of DriveSavers in the past, but their prices are expensive.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
2 drives out of 7 started spinning for me after the freezer trick long enough to get some/most data off them.
I think, as Billy Crystal would tell you, it depends if they are dead, or just mostly dead.
photorec does a pretty damned good job at getting data back if the drive is still readable. Even "simpler" methods, like chkdsk /f /r, work sometimes as well, though you might have to wait a long time to see results. (I once tried to recover a drive for a client that had several thousand bad sectors using chkdsk and it took about a month of continuous operation to recover about 40GB of data. Which was unfortunate because the drive was 1TB large.)
I use the physical methods as last resorts, since all of the ones I'm aware of can cause further damage.
I wonder how many people shell up the $1500+ for professional recovery when a few hours or days would have solved it for them...
We live in an age when these questions should be obsolete. Data without backups is data that wants to die.
Do you see what I did there?
I had a USB drive that was sitting in an attic for 2 years w/o use. It had become "sticky" and didn't want to start spinning (just went click, click, click). After about 5 minutes it did eventually start so I downloaded a 6 hour radio show and played it back at 1/4 speed to keep the drive spinning. Now the drive starts-up without any problem.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
It's better for "regular people" to find someone who knows what they're doing. It's important to understand that many of these things you can do to fix a broken hard drive are actually actions of last resort. If you know your hard drive is broken and there's no other way, you might try one of these techniques, but if you aren't sure what's going on with your hard drive, you're more likely to damage your hard drive further rather than fix it.
So let an expert determine whether your hard drive is really seriously broken or if it's something easily fixable. Your problem may actually be very minor and fixable, but if you try these things, you might break it beyond repair. If someone is going to attempt any of these measures, let it be someone with some experience.
Sometimes it's possible to ressurect a dead drive by swapping the controller board with another from the same model (or a very close model from the same range). Unfortunately with modern drives there is often information stored on the controller board which is needed for the drive to start. This information seems to be stored on a serial memory chip (usually an 8-pin device in a SOIC or similar package) on the controller board.
What i've found you can do is remove the serial memory chip from the dead controller board and solder it to the donor controller board. Provided you have a hot air rework station it's pretty easy to remove and re-fit the serial memory chips. So-far i've tried this twice and it's worked both times, YMMV of course.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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
In preparation for Y2K, we had to turn off our text archive server (at a newspaper) for the first time in, literally, years. The machine itself has been in production for six years, the last two or so of which without a reboot.
It was an IBM AIX machine with an array of 4.5GB SCSI drives. After sitting with its power off for a couple hours, we turned it back on and Nothing Happened. No drives were spinning. Crap.
Called IBM tech support. Got the run-around. Finally got to a guy who said something along the lines of "you're going to think this is crazy but do what I say in this order" followed by...
* turn machine off
* remove drives
* turn the machine on
* bang the drives on their edge a few times on the floor - don't go crazy but harder than you think is a good idea
* spin the drives flat on the ground as though they were tops
* immediately, put the drives in the enclosure
* reboot the machine but do not power it off
Damn if the guy wasn't right.
His guess was that the drives had been powered for eight or so years and the lubricant had either broken down or the heads were simply stuck to the platters. The thumping dislodged the heads and the spin gave the grease a fighting chance. {shrug}
In any case, we dared not turn it off for another year and a half until at such time it was replaced. We thought about buying replacement drives but IBM wanted something along the lines of $600 for a 4.5GB drive. Even on eBay, they were three times what we felt was reasonable.
Cheers,
Matt
I had a drive that I fixed by cleaning the contact surface between PCB and heads' connectors.
The issue is when you take it out of the freezer and if you have any sort of humidity around you. The moisture in the air will condense on the cold surfaces. You can't really put a plastic bag on the drive while it's in your machine now, can you.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
At least do it the right way.
1. Get ahold of long cables that can reach *outside* the freezer to your machine.
2. Wrap the drive *before* you put it in the freezer. Heat a towel in the oven to make sure it's dry, then wrap the drive in the towel. Now stick it in a plastic baggie, along with some silica gel packs to suck up more moisture. Try to close the mouth of the baggie around the cables as much as possible. Use duct tape if necessary.
3. Put it in the freezer, route the cables through the door seal, and make damn sure the door is shut tight as possible. Seal it with more duct tape if you have to. Let it sit in the freezer for at least 6 hours to get really cold.
4. Make all your preparations before plugging in the drive. Situate your primary machine right next to the freezer, make sure you're ready to go. If you can somehow manage it, and you know what you're doing, boot into an old copy of DOS, or a command-line interface of your preferred *nix distro. Don't waste time loading Windows if you can help it.
5. Turn off your machine, plug the drive in, then reboot.
6. Move *fast*. Start copying the drive contents over to the backup drive as fast as you can. If you can do it via a script or batch file, then even better. Speed is of the essence. In fact, if you know the locations of the files you need, as well as their general file names, then creating a batch file BEFORE starting would be your best option. Just tell it to copy everything in C:\MyLifesWork\coldfusion*.*
7. MOST IMPORTANT STEP!!! If this does not work, and you can't pull anything off the drive, then don't panic just yet. Turn off your machine, unplug the drive, then unplug the freezer.
Do NOT open the freezer until it has reached ambient temperature, which will take at least 24 hours or more.
This will prevent the drive from getting roached from the condensation, and make it more feasible for a drive recovery company to save your data.
[End Of Line]
Few years back a 20GB drive I salvaged from an old dead Thinkpad stopped working. No whirring sound, nothing...the green light on the USB enclosure stayed on.
There was no important data, but I thought "this is the chance to learn how to salvage a hard drive".
I did the freezer option. I had already used the freezer to kill ants in sugar and bugs in rice. Froze the drive overnight, took it out and immediately connected and waited for whirring sound. No sound. The drive is dead.
Gave the drive couple of almighty whacks. Still no sound. No life at all.
I threw it in the dust bin.
The next day I tried to connect a camera. The SD card on the camera failed to be identified on Windoze and Linux.
I tried another USB cable. And the camera connected fine.
It took me a few seconds to remember the old hard drive. Took it out of the trash, wiped it clean and connected.
The drive works perfectly fine even today. But it still got the smell of decomposed tea leaves.
Tat Tvam Asi
It really depends on what has failed and how. I've repaired a number of drives at work well enough to get data off with just basic software tools, like using Knoppix to force mount problematic partitions and so on. The drive may be failing but not completely so a software-only solution can do the trick.
Also I've had Spinrite work. It has about a 40% success rate but on drives that nothing else could read, I've had it make them readable again. In one case I ran Spinrite (it takes many hours, put a fan on the disk), copied the data to a new disk with Ghost, did a chkdsk, did a repair install of Windows and the system functioned flawlessly, no data or app loss. Of course the other 60% of the time it destroys the disk beyond any repair so it is a "Use only as a last resort and only if the data isn't important enough to pay for professional recovery," tool.
Replacing controllers can work if the controller is what has failed. Needs to be the precise controller so one from a like disk but different size won't work and occasionally even the firmware version can matter.
However if the problem is with the heads themselves or the platters then no, you can't do shit. You need a clean room to open the drive up without destroying it, and then of course you need something to put the platter in to for reading them.
So you can try to self repair a drive. As I said using recovery software (Knoppix with force mount is a great thing to try first) is a good first step, so long as the BIOS can see the drive. May be that you can just copy the data and call it good. However there are also plenty of situations where you can't repair it so don't count on it working. If the data is really important, send it to a pro.
WAY BACK WHEN I took the cover off a 40MB RLL disk, pushed on the spindle by hand (it had so much stiction it could not be repaired by any other means) to free it, put the cover back on, and it worked. Note, 40 megabytes. I didn't even try to improvise a clean room. My cleaning procedure was to blow on the top platter gently before I closed the drive. The drive spun up and I was able to recover 100% of the data from it, and it was nearly full. Before this happened this disk actually burned a power-carrying trace off the board and I replaced it with a wire jumper. Then later that wire got so hot that the solder melted and it fell off, and I put it back on and used it some more. You guessed it, Seizegate.
MANY TIMES I have got a non-spinning drive spinning again by whacking one corner (from the side of the drive) with a screwdriver. The last one I did this with was 80GB or so, but there's no reason why this technique should not be valid today. Connect to power, give it a sharp rap in the appropriate direction, listen to it spin. I started doing this with ST-225s which needed it very often, but I've applied it to many different disks successfully over the years.
My experiences aside, many people have put disks in the freezer or even the oven (not hard to stay below reflow temperature) and got them to free up. If it's a stiction problem it's all about thermal expansion and contraction. If the drive spins but does not work, if you're very lucky you might have a PCB problem, and if you can find a disk of the same model and version then the PCB from the other disk might work on your disk.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You can't put it entirely in your machine but if it is bad and you just want to try to recover data you don't have to. Maybe you could get extension wires for the power supply and data cables. Attach the cables, put it in a plastic bag with the cables hanging out, seal the bag with tape and then put into the freezer. When the time in the freezer is over, do not open the bag and reattach the dangling cables. Yes, there is the matter on the HD not being grounded but for the short time you need, it is not necessary.
Unless the drive has valuable data, don't bother attempting it yourself. Drive recovery companies have plenty of spare parts to swap (ha, that would be the PCB board on the back of the drive), they might be able to help as long as it isn't a head crash.
1. Gimmicks like heating and cooling a PCB have a remote chance of helping.... for a few minutes, until the PCB has operated long enough to come to normal (and implicitly failing) operating temperature. If you were super lucky you might get it to work long enough to copy off a limited amount of critical data.
2. If the value of the data on the drive exceeds a few hundred dollars (which would buy you several new hard drives), and it can't be re-input by hand at a reasonable cost, then it may be worth paying to get recovery done.
3. If your bad drive won't spin up - That is something a PCB will likely fix it.
4. If you heard your bad hard drive make a horrible sound just before it went bad - It could well be a head crash, you drive and it's data are unrecoverable, pray you have good backups.
5. If you have a few bad spots (which seems unlikely from your tone), you may be able to run Spinrite, which has a good track record for fixing this specific problem. But... If your drive is getting bad spots, it's time to retire it to the trash can and put in something (new and ) reliable, immediately after data recovery. A significant percentage of the time when the surface of the disk is starting to decay, it's from bad treatment or bad manufacturing. Replace it, rarely is peace of mind and not loosing work time worth the cost of less than $100.
6. if you have critical data, it should be backed up on to a second media, these days likely a hard drive.
My credentials?
I worked on a development engineering team for one of the first 3.5 inch (ahem, 'full size') hard drives, back in the 70's. I did drive recovery for pay as a consultant for 3 years in the early 80's and have continued working on PC hardware ever since as a professional.
The likelihood of recovering data on a flaky/bad hard drive, less than 1 in 4 is my gut estimate, being very optimistic.
I've attempted drive repair at a commercial repair companies on 3 occasions in the last 15 years, one was less than wonderful but genuinely helpful (I got 90% of my data recovered and sent to me on a new drive). But 2 were failures, and I still had to pay the fee for the data recovery service regardless, which was a few hundred dollars each time.
sigh...
Rarely does data recovery make sense.
Rarely does a TESTED data backup practice NOT make sense.
Hard disks are cheap relative to lost work and lost data.
If all else fails, buy a second drive and copy the important stuff from on to the other.
If you can't afford a second drive, Dropbox (and other similar services) will allow you to keep 2 gigs of data on there servers at no cost to you.
Clearly backing up you music or videos isn't practical but you get what you pay for. If you have work product (maintaining web sites, writing a books or training materials, etc.) or other valuable files, this will be adequate.
Good luck.
YMMV
Power supply maybe. Perhaps your external chassis provides cleaner, better power than your PC PSU?
Yep, freezer trick worked for me on two drives, and not on a third. Recovered all the data from one drive, and about half off the second. The thing is, it's a one shot, last chance attempt, since the thermal shock is as likely to kill the drive as revive it temporarily. You need patience, and dry air, and dessicant in the bag with the drive.
Two other methods which have worked were running a drive on its side (!) instead of horizontally, and keeping an overheating drive cool with extra fans (well, that one should be obvious).
Regular person? This is slashdot, there are no "regular persons" here.
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction
Is it really that hard to keep your important data backed up on an external HD? Sync up yer loadz drive with the external once a week and then if either one dies, you just copy/paste the good stuff back onto the new one (after a fresh OS install if it's yer comp drive). I format once every-other month (for that brand-spankin new feel) and use this method to restore. Yeah you have to reinstall yer programs and games, but how many games do you really need installed at one time? Keep the isos and install only what you need.
Unequivocally the realest of the realz...
What had happened was that he had some minor NTFS corruption problem, so he went to our IT dept. Some IT monkey removed the laptop drive and tried to hook it up to a SATA - IDE converter. However he managed to wire up the power backwards. That fried the drive, but actually all it really did was burn/short the power polarity protection diode.
So with magnifying glass and soldering iron, I simply removed the shorted diode, and voila (not wahlah or viola), the drive was working again. I was then able to easily clean up the NTFS problem. Boy was he happy to get all his stuff back.
I've done this a number of times, it depends what the problem is:
1) Component on controller board is dying
2) Component or mechanical failure in the main hard drive
The problems that result in the first category usually stem from components dying, usually this results in you plugging the in the drive and getting no response or os won't load the driver or incorrect bios settings for auto detection, in this case its worth a try to replace the board. I've had about a 75% success rate with this.
Mechanical problems are different. The first thing I do for these is look at the smart disk parameters, if its something to do with reading, writing, arithmetic or access times this means your drive is dying. You should immediately try and get your data off, I've seen drives get worse in a matter of hours and become completely unusable. Since you have no idea what is actually causing the problem the only thing you can do at this point is randomly change the temperature or orientation of the hard drive and hope to get some usable data off. I first try an initial copy, then turn the drive on one side and copy, then put it in the fridge. I've had success with both of these. I've also tried dropping the drive on its side to try and shift the r/w heads but I don't think that helped, sometimes I think it would if the r/w head column was misaligned or jammed. Of course, if you really want the data back you should fork out the ~1000$ and send it in, I've asked hundreds of customers if they want to do this or have us monkey around with it, I have yet for someone to take me up on paying and sending it in, maybe data isn't worth that much to most people.
Had a hard drive (Seagate 3.5" drive) that quit, I had another dead Seagate someone gave to me that had
the same PCB board, but a few versions off (newer). I exchanged PCB boards and my dead drive
was fine again. Nothing lost, and it continued to work until it became too small.
Had one drive that wouldn't spin-up, so I took the cover off and spun it up myself. Once it
got going it was fine so I could grab whatever I needed from it. It worked every time I need it to (no data loss).
I had used NT resource kit's Diskmap as part of a recovery preparation I'd never use. I figure
messing around somehow screwed up my hard drive. Just happened to find a print out of the Diskmap
and used NT resource kit's Disk Probe to rebuild the partition table - I would wish that upon an enemy, horrid program.
Just a few of my hard drive fixes, Oh ya a person can fix their own.
Hiren's BootCD - everybody needs this as part of their utilities (I like version 10)
Side note: I've suggested the freezer trick to others, never used it myself. I did use the oven trick on my Video Card, fixed it right up.
"There's a lot of FUD when it comes to self-repairing a broken hard drive.
Not really. There is a lot of anecdotal "it worked for me" experiences. Failed drives are a replacable item. Most people working the field don't replace drives long enough in their field to hit all the corner cases - like that awesome mechanic who's pushing 120 years old and can fix your bent drive shaft in about 15 minutes.
Does sticking it in the freezer help? Hitting it with a hammer?
Yes, but I've found a bucket of ice with some water in it to level it off, and the drive in multiple bags to keep the water out while you try to pull data from it, is a good approach if you want to recover data. This seems to work about half the time when simply using something like I've found that giving a drive a good short drop (4 foot) onto a non-cement floor or a very short drop onto a table, or evenly hitting it with a heavy rubber mallet (eg. and using a 2x4 to distribute the percussive impact), then submersing it, will typically work about half the time when the symptom is the disk won't spin up or has clicking/causes crashing/etc.
Never, never hit it with a metal mallet or drop it on a cement floor. You'll blow the thing up inside (or at least it did the two times I looked).
The oven?
I've never tried it, but it's doubtful unless the problem is electrical current related on the PCB. I suppose it's possible you damaged the drive PCB by hitting it with the hammer could damage it, and the oven might 're-flow' the shitty tin solder on the PCB or within the drive. It might also 'knock down' tin whiskers. I suspect the oven would've fix some of the newer drives which supposedly use better tin based solder to avoid the whisker problem.
Does replacing the PCB actually work?
Can you take the platters out and put them in another drive?
You can, but you're going to want to have a 'clean room' environment to do it. Some people's houses are approaching that, but I would not personally trust any place of business I've seen or my house.
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?
I've only had to do it a 3 times for people. $1200-$2100 and they got "their" drive shipped back to them - same make and model - with their data on it. In one case it was a dump of 'random' recovered files (everything had a seemingly random name, but it all appeared to be there - it took him months to go through it all) and another it was just a normal filesystem. A third time (the more expensive time) they got a newer, larger drive shipped to them with the contents of the disk. In all cases it was "all" of the data, so 3/3 were recoveries with ~100% success rate of useful data.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Don't know how successful this would be today, but I've seen it done maybe 10 years ago.
I think most drive failures are bearing failures. So, sometimes you can get it to spin-up by tapping, etc.
A co-worker couldn't get a drive going that way, so he just opened it up, and gave it a little push and it spun-up. He got his data off, and then left it running, to see how long it would last. It worked for a week in open-air before it finally failed. I don't remember now if it started getting errors or just physically stopped spinning. (It *was* a bearing failure in process, after all...)
Backups.
Please put dates on your war-story recovery experiences. If you don't remember, give the drive's size.
Please don't be pointlessly coy about naming the recovery vendor who could or couldn't recover your data, the price they quoted, the price you finally paid them. Don't say nothing. Don't say "a certain major vendor, har har." Just tell us who they are. You don't have long before these sketchy tradies see the article and flood the comments with self-serving FUD.
Please state what was wrong with the drive before you tried to recover it, ex:
* didn't spin
* didn't identify
* latent sector errors (ex. "OS keept crashing")
None of the upvoted comments have these details which is making the article useless for me.
For my own experience,
(a) I had full, easy success swapping the controller of an IBM 9GB SCSI drive, but the old controller had been visibly damaged. SMD gull-wing (?) pins were smashed. This is a rare failure case for me.
(b) I'm often able to recover data from the third category of drive with 'dd if=/dev/olddrive of=/dev/newdrive bs=512 conv=noerror,sync'. (there is also dd_rescue, but I don't use it). This works on Linux or Mac, but on Solaris you must use GNU dd for it to work---the included one is just broken. Obviously you need to boot off a drive other than the one that's failing. The drive must be unmounted when you use dd. It takes several days to read a failing drive this way, and about a quarter-day to copy a fully-working drive this way, so the excessively slow/dumb retry cycles in the firmware and storage stack mean your drive is spinning long enough to get worse, if it's decaying (something to consider for self-service vs. pro recovery).
I've been able to recover data from several hard drives over the years using the "freezer trick." But I have never repaired a drive using that trick. The drives would always eventually stop working again, usually within a half hour or so..
There was an old Quantum SCSI drive popular in older Macs (Performa desktops IIRC) that would suffer a seized spindle bearing after being idle too long. These could be revived by taking it out of the chassis, cables still attached, and hitting the frame with a mallet as you power the machine on.
You're doing it wrong. The approach works, but it's kind of like replacing an oil filter on a car: it doesn't really help much unless you also put more oil in.
Use a bucket full of ice with water in it. Double/triple wrap the drive in water-tight plastic bags (test them), and get a good air-tight seal going with the drive inside. Meanwhile, you've got a power and data cable snaked and taped into the bag, attached to the disk.
No condensation - you just have to be careful about splashing. Added bonus, it keeps the drive cool throughout the recovery - with heat or friction-induced mechanical tolerance loss being the primary causes, but other mechanical tolerance issues can also be helped.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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
It depends. If it's part of a RAID array (as in part of a RAID 1 array) you undoubtedly have at least two drives of the same make/model. However this is the only situation where replacing the PCB works, and the PCB failure rate is not that high. We're talking about literal damage to the PCB to warrant replacing it.
The drive platters itself, forget it. If they've been damaged, or the heads have struck the platters, they've likely been snapped off and will not work. It's not possible to fix.
The bearings (eg the drive makes whine or grinding noise) you may have some luck recovering it. This will only work around the spindle motor not starting up, you may be able to change the temperature or humidity to get it to spin up, but if it spins up, copy everything off immediately, because it's unlikely to work a second time.
Laptop drives are rather brittle, and generally die a lot more often than desktop drives (one laptop I had went through one drive per year) where as the MacMini with the same size of drive, still is running on that drive.
Captcha: drives
IBM Deskstars used glass platters which had a much higher expansion per unit of heat. After they got too warm, the heads would be out of position relative to the surface. Freezing those drives were nearly every time for me. I do find it interesting that the drives couldn't compensate correctly for expansion, but they worked just fine for contraction as the platters should have shrunk at the same rate as they cooled.
Once I had a client who's hard disk broke down when his last backup of it was several months old. It seemed dead, but there was a lot of expensive data on it, so I took it straight to a professional. His services cost me about $2.000 and did restore a lot of the data, but not in the way that I expected. He sent me a couple of DVDs ten days later with on the one hand long lists of the names of the files that had been restored, and on the other the files with the data. The only problem was that the data files all had random names, so we were still faced with the task of figuring out which files had which names. For about 10.000 files. My client was relieved to have (most of) his data back, but was obviously disappointed with the results.
Of course, the trick is to never allow yourself to get anywhere near this kind of situation. The worst of it could have been avoided if my client had stuck to making his regular backups or had simply used RAID (or preferably done both).
Best Hard Drive Disk Utility available. License structure Steve has is pretty liberal. http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
I have a hard drive that makes death knell clicking noises when it's installed internally, but works like a charm when it's installed into an external enclosure. I'm probably just replacing it, but what might be causing the different results?
I've heard of this before, you might be putting a strain on it; by it's position (warp/uneven) in the case or screws too tight.
I did exactly that and it worked well for the 120BG drive I tried it on. I attached a USB PATA adapter onto it, then a power supply that came with the adapter, put a ziploc bag around that, sucked the air out, put tape around the opening where the wires came out. Closed the freezer door with the wires sticking out and waited an hour before hooking the drive up. No point in doing it while the drive is out of the freezer since they heat up fast. Best to do it where the cold air comes out and turn the temp down as far as it will go too.
In my case, I think it was the electronics heating up that was the problem, not a mechanical issue, but it worked.
Freezer trick only works on 'clicks of death', i.e. to get the head to stop recalibrating so much so you can get the data off the drive before permadeath.
Whenever you hear of 'hard drive tricks' you always have to qualify the statement.
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.
Personally I have had one success swapping PCB's on a drive and getting the data off. Of course this requires that the PCB is bad and not the platters. Most bad drives don't sound good (platter issue) so I don't usually bother (ear to drive can tell you a lot).
I have tried the freezer method 3-4 times with no luck, though friends say they have had success.
Usually if the drive is semi-accessible you can use tools like Easy Recovery (OnTrack) or Recuva (Piriform) to get some data off.
When I worked at Sun Microsystems back in 1992, the Quantum 105 mb disk drive was still pretty common in desktop systems. They had a problem with the bearings getting sticky, so that if a machine were powered down, the drives would often not spin back up when they were powered back on. Different things were tried to get 'em to spin back up. Some guys would power the machine on, pick it up and drop it on the table, hoping the jarring would get the disk spinning, and that would sometimes actually work. What I found worked for me was to loosen the drive from its mount, but leave it cabled. I'd then power the machine on and holding the drive by its side, give it a quick little twisting motion and that would loosen the disk enough to get it start to spin. It would take it a few seconds to get up to speed, and then it would begin boot. I had to reseat the drive live after that, put the cover back on the case, and then the monitor back on top (pizza box cases on those old Sparc 1, 1+ and 2 machines). We also still ran thick ethernet. Good times...
The consistent experience is that most people messing with broken drives make it worse (i.e. more expensive) or impossible to recover. You have to take into account that people needing to recover a disk in the first place have usually already demonstrated gross incompetence by not having a reasonable backup. This does not bode well for their chances to accomplish a complicated recovery operation right.
That said, if it is just a matter of convenience, i.e. if the data on the drive is not important, go for it. There is a small chance (5% in my experience) that you can actually recover things. That is for a drive not quite dead only. For a dead drive, professional data recovery services are the only real option. Take care though, that there are a lot of data recovery services that are anything but professional and will not only grossly overcharge you, but likely break a recoverable drive permanently.
As to prices, the usual fees from professional services are quite reasonable. Recovery of a drive with real mechanical problems at, say, 5000...10000 USD is not overpriced. Just because the mass-produced equipment is cheap does not mean doing any non-standard operations on it is. My guess is that the reason for the complaints about prices stem mostly from the fact that people needing these services were to cheap or stupid to do backups before anyways. These complaints cannot be taken as a representative sample.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"7. MOST IMPORTANT STEP!!! If this does not work, and you can't pull anything off the drive, then don't panic just yet. Turn off your machine, unplug the drive, then unplug the freezer."
That's ridiculous. You don't have to defrost your fridge. Just leave the drive in the air-tight bag, ideally with some dessicant in it. Once you've taken the moisture out of the contents of the bag, changing temperatures aren't going to cause any condensation. Don't break the seal until you are back to ambient temperature, and there will be no issue.
I've done a LOT of data recovery, and Spinrite is the first tool I grab. It's cheap and works regardless of the OS. I've recovered Windows, Linux, BSD and Mac drives. I've recovered SAS RAID arrays, too.
I've done the freezer trick too, and it works in many cases, as does the PCB swap.
Place nail here >+
Yeah, that occurred to me after posting it. Also, under "ideal" conditions, this would be done using a "college" freezer, preferably one without any food in it.
[End Of Line]
I work in a datacenter with large numbers of un-raided servers. Generally when someone wants to fix a drive, they just want their data off. Corrupted Filesystems due to Physical Problems: Corrupted filesystems are frequently due to bad blocks in the filesystem metadata. The fs metadata tends to go first because its the most read part of the disk. I've had really good luck with ddrescue for this sort of error (at least for ext3). Have ddrescue skip error blocks and keep a log of bad blocks, otherwise it'll literally take a week to recover. (Instructions: http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue) Fried Drive Controllers: These will generally completely fail to turn on or read at all. They're usually not detected as disks. Replacing the PCB would probably work if I were any good at hacking type soldering. If you're tempted to try sticking a drive in the freezer, just let it sit for 1-4 months instead. I believe it's effectively the same fix but with far lower of a chance of borking the electronics due to mosture. Believe it or not a fair number of drives will come back to live after this period of time (~15-20% I would *guess*). Mainly you should just be aware of the warning signs. Disappearing files, folders that cause crashes, ext3 related stack traces, and filesystems being auto-remounted as read-only are all signs that its about time the evacuate to a new disk within a day, two at the max. Bad ball bearings generally don't kill hard drives. Disks making weird unlubricated drive bearing/shaft sounds can still work for a year or so. If this disk seems to shutter or obviously has problems starting to spin you should definetely copy your data to a new disk, anything less will mainly just injure people's hearing. The main problem with bad bearing is that it *really* increases the amount of heat in the computer (which in turn can kill hard drives).
...repair a broken heart, tame a wild spirit, forgive their nemesis, build a cabin, fight a whale, milk an otter, trip an elephant, shame a newspaper, lose a habit, wear it down, in a fashionable sense?
Probably not. But let's keep trying.
I once was given a drive to repair that had probably been dropped. It wouldn't even spin up. The owner wasn't willing to pay $500 for recovery, and asked me to just do anything possible. So, I carefully removed the lid (no dust precautions!) and tried to rotate the platter by hand - it wouldn't go, because the head had physically stuck to it. With the careful application of brute force, I was able to free it, and to my amazement it actually worked. Then the use of dd_rescue was able to recover almost all the data!
Generally I've seen the freezer trick as "stick it in a bag of rice or silica gel, then put that in the freezer. When you take it out leave it in the bag and plug the cables in without removing it from the desiccant."
Not a sentence!
I used a temperature/humidity chamber designed for environmentally stress testing electronics when I did the freezer trick. This machine has holes for cables already, so it was pretty easy. I set the chamber to 2 deg. C (water to ice expansion would be bad if water is inside the drive) and a low relative humidity setting, turned the computer and drive on, and got the data off. Worked like a charm!
I'm 1 for 2 with PCB swaps over the years. Swapping out the PC board is about as basic as it gets assuming you know how to turn a Torx screwdriver. Some newer drives have coded ROM chips that may also need to be moved from the original board to the replacement PCB. That was the case for a Samsung 1TB drive I recently lost. I did a PCB + ROM swap on it only to learn that the head servos had gone and the PCB was fine. I was out a total of $25 for the PCB + Shipping from China, which was a logical first step considering the next step required spending upwards of $1000+ for a clean room extraction.
In any case, I wouldn't generally recommend doing a surface mount ROM swap with a heat gun unless you know what you're doing, but I've been quite successful using a few layers of aluminum foil with a precise cut out for the chip to reduce the amount of heat that gets through to the rest of the board.
1- Clicking Ultrastar in my IBM PC Server 330. Bought a similar model on eBay (altough standard SCSI, not SCA) and swapped the PCB.
2- Blown PCB on a 80GB Seagate (thanks LaCIE). swapped PCB from an identical I had. Still in service.
3- Stuck spindle on an old Conner, gently hit the desk with the drive, got the data.
4- Freezer trick worked on an old Quantum.
BUT, if the data is vital to your business, I suggest not messing around or use any recovery software. It will just make it harder (and more expensive) for data recovery companies to get your data back.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
It worked for me the one time I tried it. The hard drive was knocking like a fiend and the computer wouldn't boot. I wrapped the drive in plastic wrap before freezing it then unwrapped it right before plugging it in. I had no condensation problems and I was able to recover the data needed.
Years ago I got a 512mb IDE HDD either from the trashcan or a friend who worked in a computer shop gave it to me. It might have been a Maxtor, but I wouldn't bet anything on that. It would show ok on the bus but didn't spin up albeit emitting some mechanical sound. Just to give it a try as a last resort I opened the enclosure as little as possible and used a small screwdriver to spin the disks a turn or two by pushing them along the edge. After that, the enclosuse sealed again, it DID spin up and I could use it, e.g. get data from it, write to it. Not sure how it would have done in the longer run, but touching the enclosure wa suseful in this case.
RAID does provides some redundancy, but it is NOT a backup method. I can't tell you the times I've seen/heard of RAID failure causing data loss. Of particular consequence are the drives that fail to store store and retrieve the correct data. Even RAID 5 and 6 can only reconstruct data if the drive reports a failure. If the drive is spitting out bad data, or failing to record data, it's gone.
RAID is primarily for performance. It only adds a smidgen of reliability.
(I keep waiting for someone to come out with a RAID 6 ECC standard. Yes, It would be slow, but it would be reliable. Sometimes that's desirable. I think some of the expensive RAID cards can do this, though I've never seen one.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
First off, you have to define "Regular Person"
Regular Non-Tech-Interested, Non-Tinkering Person: No.
Regular Tech-Interested, Tinkering Person: Maybe. Could possibly recover from basic platter damage(1 to a few thousand bad blocks), possibly from PCB failure of the overheating type. Not likely to recover from total pcb failure, motor failure, head failure, etc.
Regular IT Person: Yes. Can definitely recover from basic platter damage, possibly from PCB failure of the overheating type(if patient enough). Still not likely to recover from total pcb failure, motor failure, head failure, etc.
There may be better software out there, but all of my successful recoveries have used 3 or more the following 6 components:
1. Non-Windows OS for recovery platform. As far as I can tell, you need an OS with /dev. I've yet to figure out on Windows how to hit the block level device directly. Maybe the drive recovery apps do it, but I haven't had much luck. For marginal drives, it seems like Windows mounts the drive and starts trying to muscle it's way through reading it, which either locks up the UI or makes the drive worse by repeatedly trying to access the same damaged regions of the drive.
2. ddrescue (not dd_rescue). ddrescue is IMO a great example of "the culture of unix-like development(?)", which is to say it is simple, does one thing, but does that one thing really well in a refined manner. ddrescue basically does block level copying of a disk to a file, avoiding error areas on it's initial pass by randomly skipping ahead when read errors are encountered. Error areas are logged to a simple text file, and when the full disk has been read it uses the log file to go back and narrow down the error areas. Nearly every successful drive recovery I've handled used ddrescue. I've had disks that would not mount in Windows, and actually clicked rhythmically like they had head/pcb failure, that boiled down to a single bad block. The clicking was from the drive repeatedly trying to read the same location early in the mounting process.
3. testdisk/photorec. After using ddrescue, if the error areas affected the partition map, testdisk can often help recover the partition info. It's not particularly user friendly and not something I would risk telling a non-tech to use, but does what it does well. Photorec is an undelete program.
4. rsync. (sometimes used with #5). Basically a file sync utility. Could just as well be robocopy in Windows, although I think rsync may be a bit more intelligent in terms of doing an incremental update with repeated interruptions.
5. Cold. PCB/component failures that are heat related will obviously respond to the freezer trick. I had a drive that when warm, wouldn't mount at all. When chilled to freezer temps it would mount and be fully accessible for about 2 minutes. I was able to identify the overheating chip with a human digital instrument of the index sort. I took a small flat copper plate, about 1/16 thick and 1" long, applied thermal paste to it, wedged it on top of the chip while ensuring it wouldn't short anything else(chip was on drive side of PCB), then re-did the freezer test. With this make-shift heat sink I was able to get about 20 minutes of uptime on the drive, which was long enough to use rsync to do a full recovery.
6. Patience. None of the above methods is quick. A simple ddrescue recovery will take several hours at the least, and can take much longer if there are tons of error areas.
As for the non-recoverable scenarios, platter/head replacement supposedly requires a clean room, clean box. PCB replacement supposedly requires the ability to read custom firmware parameters from the dead drive and write said parameters to the donor PCB, or requires de-soldering/re-soldering of firmware/eeprom chips from the dead board to the new board. I haven't had success with PCB swaps since the days of 540MB hard drives.
2. Wrap the drive *before* you put it in the freezer. Heat a towel in the oven to make sure it's dry, then wrap the drive in the towel. Now stick it in a plastic baggie, along with some silica gel packs to suck up more moisture. Try to close the mouth of the baggie around the cables as much as possible. Use duct tape if necessary.
Now that your house has burned down from the towel that caught on fire, that dead HD doesn't seem like such a big deal!
I have changed boards in old drives, and I have had drives that worked after I cooled then down. The secret is, once you get them working, back up all of the data that you can get off them, and then THROW THEM OUT! You are kidding yourself if you think that a repair drive is OK.
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Why the desire to scold people for attempting to fix a broken HDD? Even the referenced article seems to want to underscore the idea that it's impossible. I personally have recovered data from failed drives (including modern ones) using the freezer, the hammer, the heat, the platter swap, the PCB swap and just removing the cover and freeing a stuck component. I've failed but more often I've succeeded. Clearly the people shouting about it being impossible are not using real-world experience to base their opinions on. For most people the $2-10K recover fee is simply out of the question and in their case at least attempting, though increasingly extreme measures, to get the drive to spin up one last time is the most rational choice since the only alternative is to toss it in the trash.
Back in the early 1990s (when I was working for a company that had more money than sense), we took the top off a 20MB Seagate HD and ran it for a day with no protection from dust, moisture or whatever.
Everyone in the building came past to watch the heads move and the platters spin.
It performed faultlessly.
Quite surprising -- considering the weight given to clean-rooms and the supposed risk of head-crash that even the tiniest speck of dust was supposed to produce.
We didn't put the drive back into proper service but it was enlightening.
A "friend" gave me a Seagate 50MB SCSI drive back when it was just a little bit outdated. It powered up to a horrible grinding, shredding sound but still managed to read out maybe 10KB/s of data. That grew old quickly because I really wanted the sweet, sweet Amiga warez stored on it. Fearing that it was going to die at any moment and figuring I had nothing to lose, I flipped it over and squirted some 3-in-1 oil into the bearing.
The grinding smoothed into a high-speed whine and I watched with glee as the transfer rates crept up to a more civilized 700KB/s. I copied its contents onto my palatial 250MB drive and put the geezer out of its misery.
I have not before or since sped up a computer by oiling it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've been a computer tech and consultant for almost exactly 20 years now. Back when I started, nobody could afford to just get a new drive or do data recovery. We had to try things to get them to work if at all possible, or to recover the data. So we learned a lot of tricks. .000001 - Run air over your drives. ALWAYS. 90% of the reason drives die is due to excessive heat and no way to get rid of it in the case. If you have a big fan at the rear and are generating negative pressure, placing your drive(s) in slot 1 and 3 and opening up the panel cover for slot #2 also works. Mount the drives with one upside-down so that the circuit boards are in the airflow. Or use a fan to push air over the drives. If they are too hot to easily touch, they are literally frying and will die in a year or two. Sometimes in a few months.
0.5 - Run your system in Raid 1. This uses a drive as a live backup, so if there's a physical problem with one, the array crashes - pull the bad drive and reboot - it's a normal single drive system now. WAY cheaper than data recovery. I use 250-300GB drives or whatever is smallest and reliable for the boot drive array and the main programs and data is on a second drive. It's almost always the main boot drive that gets corrupted or dies due to the higher usage.
1 - If the drive is a brick, it's almost always the controller board that fried. A swap will work, though it will also lose track of what sectors are bad, so you want to mount the drive as a data drive or under linux/knoppix so that you're only reading data off of it. If you get it up, aim for the email and critical personal files entirely. Ignore the applications directory and system as those will need to be be re-installed anyways.
2 - If turns on but fails to spin up/clicks and does nothing (it'll make a small "tiktik" sound), the motor and bearings are gummed up or shot. The solution is to get the computer in as dust-free of an environment as possible. Get your data recovery software running. Put the drive in an external drive box. Leave the top off. Try cycling the drive several times - it will mount and un-mount the drive - and if it spins up, do data recovery immediately. If it doesn't spin up after about ten tries, carefully un-do the screws on the top while it isn't running. DO NOT take the lid off. Get your fingers clean and take the cover off. Power up the drive and when you see the drive nudge a bit and try to start, give it a little help with your fingers around the center spindle assembly. Do not touch the platters, obviously. Once it starts up, put the lid back on and put something fairly heavy on it to seal the lid a bit. Since the drive is compromised and dust can cause crashes and data errors, you have one shot to get the data off, essentially. Dump it all and toss the old drive.
2a: if you see a massive scratch in the surface and the head is at one end of it (this will cause the motor to also jam up). you've had a classic "head crash" - see #4 below. Earthquakes often cause this or dropping your laptop. Most drives park their heads between writes, but it's also why you should try to keep the system from running tons of background crap all the time - because when one DOES hit, the drive will be reading or writing (say, you run a torrent program or a game server all the time)
note - usually you can hear bearings going out long beforehand. Whining drives are a sign of a drive nearing its end of life. IME, most drives last about 3 years of daily use before they start to have issues.
3: if it starts up do you see no data, the boot sectors likely got fried. Power surges and unmounting drives without turning them off usually will eventually lead to the area where it parks the heads getting fried or worn out. Download a tool like Easy Recovery Professional. The trial version only allows you to recover 1 file, but the main mounting tool and boot sector repair tools function just like in the full version. Sometimes I've gotten clients data visible b
The easy way to fix it is to use Time Machine (or some equivalent), then when the drive dies you replace it.
Really, it's the easiest fix since putting a drive into your system only takes 15 mins - 1 hour (depending on the system... generic PC case Vs iMac/Macbook Pro), installing the OS only takes about 30 mins - 1 hour, and restoring from Time Machine (or it's equivalent) is probably the longest part.
Or just go RAID.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
One of the weirdest problems that I've experimented with hard drives was the case of a drive "shrinking" to half its size. It wasn't a file system or partition problem because even the setup of various computers reported that 2TB drive as 931GB corrupting all the data in the process. I've almost threw the drive in the trash but after some research I've discovered that the real problem some stupid shit made by my motherboard flash utilituy. It basically tries to backup itself on the Hidden Protected Area of the drive and "resizes" it to remain invisible that. The problem is that it resized the drive quickly.
Although the only tools that I've managed to find that could recover the size of the disk only run in 32 bit Windows XP I was able to recover that hard disk to its correct size.
But yeah I had backups and the drive that got shrinked was a member of a mirrored ZFS zpool but I cringe in fear that I might accidentally touch "F9" every time this system boots up.
I've done things as simple as opening the top of the drive and it started working again. This isn't a long-term fix, but it seems to confirm that the drive was just a little tweaked. I'm guessing that the freezer trick has a similar effect of shifting things, just a little. Replacing a circuit board is pretty far out as I bet each drive has an individual defect map, so it would likely have random problems after. I've seen this done, with success, but I wouldn't bother. If it matters a lot, get somebody professional to help. If you can live with total loss, I'd sure pop the top again... just long enough to transfer the data.
Wrap a couple of layers of paper towel around the drive before you put it in the freezer.
This will also help avoid leaving a couple of layers of skin on the drive when you take it out of the freezer.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"Yes, there is the matter on the HD not being grounded..."
If you have a power and/or data cable attached, it's grounded.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Copy all the data to something else and have a quick word with WD about invoking that 5 year warranty.
And make sure you can use an "advanced format" drive, 'cause that's bound to be what they'll replace it with.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
They have a forum section where you can commiserate with others and maybe find somebody with the PCB board you need.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Just a little hint from someone who used to repair electronics by freezing them insitu with a can of freeze spray, condensation won't kill electronics. I've done your trick before too. It wasn't nearly as complicated though:
1. Take harddisk and put it in the freezer.
2. Wait a few hours.
3. Take harddisk out of freeze and plug into computer.
4. Bootup and start copying like mad.
5. Stare in wonder as your drive covered in frost and condensation still works while realising that pure water is actually non conductive.
Every fortnight, illuminated only by silvery moon light, rub a black cat on the failing drive -- always rub away from you -- while chanting the Lorem ipsum prayer.
3-4 repetitions should yield a fully working, fault-free drive. If not, the cat just isn't black enough.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Fixed one for a work colleague - it was a 1TB drive in an external enclosure and had 'stopped working'. The IT guy had deduced it had gone short circuit after it blew two of the IT guy's power supplies when he removed it from the enclosure and tried to power it directly.
It (as usual) had very important documents and photos on it. So I said I'd take a look and IT guy with a laugh bet me $100 that I had no hope. ....CHALLENGE ACCEPTED....
I poked about on the board with a multimeter for a bit and discovered there was a dead short on the 12V rail. A suspicious-and-large-looking (for a SMD component,anyway) was just inboard from the SATA power connector, so with nothing to lose, I desoldered it.
Ta-da! Short was gone. Drive powered up fine, so we immediately pulled all the data off it. Looked up the number on the device, turns out it was a 14.7V zener diode. I presume at some stage the drive had been subjected to overvoltage and shorted out the protective zener. Seeing that it was in an enclosure, it's possible someone put the wrong power adaptor on it I guess.
Anyway, happy ending and the drive still works... it's just used for non-critical stuff now.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Anyone know of successful at-home internal failure repair, e.g. head crash? I know it's super risky, but tools are available to replace heads, etc.
God forbid anyone would foolishly deprive themselves of the opportunity to blow $1500 on a drive recovery from the grand masters of service fee obfuscation.
I recovered one drive using the freezer method. Another one didn't come back to life and we did end up paying the extravagant recovery fee, which succeeded despite my freezer attempt.
Sad story: I identified the recovered drive before it failed as a catastrophe waiting to happen based on a combination of age/uniqueness of contents. It died seat-belted upright into the back seat of a plush sedan in a mild-mannered 15m drive en route to a site with full network backup facilities. In this case, the mountain should have gone to Mohamed. This was circa 2000 where high capacity external USB drives were not exactly a dime a dozen, and people still thought time was money ("have mountain will travel" is so post-recession 2009).
PS. Don't ever eat anything contaminated with Jerry Germ. Really.
PPS. Jerry Germ was my first childhood experience with post-war paranoia, disguised as Hun-hating Hand-i-Wipe brain washing for young children.
I was able to rescue data from an older 120 GB drive using Roadkil's Unstopable Copier http://www.roadkil.net/
It really all depends on the type of failure you have.
"Back in the day" (mid-90s) when that was more common, the term for it was "stiction." I don't know if it's less common these days because disk mechanisms are more reliable, the lubricants are better, or machines have much shorter average service lifetimes.
SGI field-service engineers actually had a rubber mallet specifically dedicated to coaxing stictioned drives to run for long enough to get the data off them. The Micropolis disks they shipped in their workstations back then were notorious for that (among many other problems). The company I worked for at the time had such a service call, and the technician told me that the hard part wasn't getting the disk running again, but convincing the disk that whanging the disk with a hammer was a sane thing to do!
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
About 8 years ago my primary hard drive crashed. I was devastated! But, I bought a new drive and re-loaded my operating system and all my apps. There I was with a clean computer, but, all my pics, data, saved game files, etc. were on the "crashed" drive. Even though I've been fiddling with computers since my first Commodore Vic 20 in the 80s, I don't consider myself a computer geek. Hell, I'm a Pharmacist. Drugs I know, computers, not so much. However, I searched the net and ran across the freezer trick. Since I had nothing to lose, I proceeded to try it. I stuck the drive in a sealable baggie and forced out as much air as possible. Then I stuck it in the freezer overnight. Before taking it out of the freezer I made sure I had a power and data lead sticking out the side of my computer. I booted the computer up and pulled the drive out of the freezer. I did not wait for it to reach room temp as others have have advised, but, hooked it up and it worked. I immediately started dragging files off of it to the desktop. It ran for about 7 or 8 minutes before crashing again. I then thought, hell, it worked once it may work again! So, I stuck it back into the freezer for another half an hour. I then repeated the process. I did this a total of 8 times, but, in the end, I managed to pull all the "lost forever" files off of the drive. I still don't consider myself a "geek", but I do consider myself considerably lucky! It worked!!!, and I didn't have to pay some data recovery company $750 to save my files. When I finally bought a new computer, I got an identical extra hard drive and now use a raid configuration to mirror the primary hard drive. I also tend to back-up my pics and important data, etc,. That was the first and only drive I ever had crash, and, I hope it will be my last!
My karma is bad. Don't get too close!!!
You insensitive clod! That URL just crashed my hard drive!
AC: There were recent, reliable backups and the RS/6000 system was under an (expensive) IBM maintenance contract. While we had one or two spare drives on the shelf, we didn't have the six that locked-up.
We were paying IBM for its knowledge through the service contract and we got our money's worth there. Where we were in line to get screwed was in the hardware replacement cost.
At a time when the going rate for hard drives was about two cents per megabyte, IBM wanted more than 13 cents per megabyte. We would have gladly paid double but six times more was off the table for a system that was already in the budget for replacement.
Cheers,
Matt
The data recovery company we use whenever our customers need it is about 1200 to start, 1800 if you don't provide destination media, and quickly skyrocketing if the damage is bad enough.
Or the much easier way that I use: Buy a block of dry ice. Put it in a cooler. Drop the hard drive on the dry ice and close the lid, dangling the cables out. The CO2 drives out any water vapor. When you're done you just leave the drive inside until the rest of the dry ice sublimes away and the drive gets back to room temperature while still sitting in the dry chest.
It's also much more effective at cooling - the hard drive in the freezer will quickly warm up above room temperature when it starts operating. The cold air in the freezer doesn't conduct heat quickly enough. Sitting on a block of dry ice often lets you run nonstop. For the same reason, if you DO go with the freezer method, pack it in between a couple bags of peas or something instead of just sitting on the rack.
Also, there's no point in unplugging the freezer if you have the drive in a plastic bag. Any moisture that was in there originally will still be there tomorrow. All the new moisture condenses on the outside of the bag.