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?

Comments

One word

[mknewman]

No.

Re:One word

[SuricouRaven]

The old write-over trick. Yes, what you're doing is actually forcing the drive to remap bad sectors. How reliably it works after depends on what caused the bad sectors in the first place.

Re:One word

[t4ng*]

As someone that worked as an engineer in the hard drive manufacturing industry for 15 years I would have to agree, "No."

You might be able to revive a drive if it is a problem with a PCB, but if it is a problem with the disks or heads, forget about it!

Incidentally, a "hard drive crash" used to mean a head touched the disk and physically damaged the head and/or the disk. But for nearly two decades now, heads in hard drives are "contact heads," meaning the smallest part of the gap between the head and the disk is smaller than the mean free path of air molecules. However the heads are "flying" at a fairly high angle of attack, so it is really only the trailing edge of the head that is in contact with the disk at all times. Between that contact head design and auto retracting armatures that pull the heads off the data area of the disks, actual head crashes are extremely rare under normal operating conditions.

Re:One word

[ckedge]

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.)

Re:One word

[blackicye]

One word: Yes.

Longer version: But it may be more difficult to do nowadays; I don't know. About 7 years ago a family member had a computer with a lot of photos that were, sadly, not backed up. The Maxtor drive had suddenly quit. I was able to eBay another drive with the same model number and swap the boards, and voila! We had a working drive with all of the photos (and other data) intact.

Again, I have no idea how easy that would be to do nowadays... It was hard enough to change boards with my clumsy fingers on a 3.5" drive, let alone a mobile drive.

This will not work with many newer drives, especially WD Caviar Black and Blue. There is a firmware chip on the PCB that also needs to be transplanted, and this is tricky even with a Surface mount electronics soldering station, the type that uses channeled hot air.

Re:One word

[Mathieu Lu]

Here are two PCB sellers in HK who ship overseas:
http://www.onepcbsolution.com/
http://www.hkmingdi.com/enindex.asp

I found them off the forum of this site:
http://www.deadharddrive.com/

I wrote a short post about it in French, you can probably run it in google-translate. It took me a bit of time to figure out the PCB number on my Seagate drive, which is on the PCB, but on the side facing the disk, so I had to unscrew it to obtain it. (both HK sites were helpful and responded to my e-mails in good English).
http://www.bidon.ca/fr/random/2011-04-12-disque-dur-ressuscite

It Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

my experience

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

One trick not listed

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:One trick not listed

[Waffle Iron]

Did you remember that you also need to drill a hole on the top of the new drive?

Otherwise, the data will just spill out onto your desk.

won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Been there, done that, time wasted..

[brokenin2]

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..

Freezer trick...

[bayankaran]

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.

personal experiences

[v1]

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'

Re:Give Spinrite a try

[gweihir]

Pure snake-oil today. It used to have some merit in the MFM and RLL days, but these are long over. The only thing SpinRite can do today is to cause more damage to the drive if it has mechanical problems. If the drive is mechanically fine, repeated read accessed do exactly the same as SpinRite does, because it does not have any other possibility on modern drives.