Attempt at hdd data recovery

Forget it, no way.

If the data is that important, send it to a professional data recovery service. About all you'll succeed in doing is making it impossible for any hope of any recovery at all. Period.

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Theres nothing really important on there. My friend dropped their laptop and they didn't have their photos backed up on cd's. I read an article about doing this yourself, and thought what the heck, it might be kind of fun, even if it didn't work.

Here is the website

- Mike

I think that's intended as a joke. The methods described there would best be described as data destruction rather than recovery. Just opening a modern hard drive will cause it to fail almost immediately. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Andy Cuffe spake thus:

I wonder; the person who wrote those instructions sounds as if they know what they're talking about, perhaps because they're a HDD tech. I always thought too that such a thing was impossible: one tiny speck of dust and bam! that's it; but maybe it's not beyond us mere mortals without bunny suits and sub-micron air filters to do this.

I don't think I'll be trying this any time soon, though.

--
Save the Planet
Kill Yourself

- motto of the Church of Euthanasia (http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/)

Not true but it increases the risk of that. Running it after opening outside of a clean room is very risky.

Yeah but if the data isn't very valuable its worth the fun of trying if I can get a spare hdd for cheap or free. The hardest part is getting the un crashed heads off the other hdd without destroying them. I'm not too worried about losing a few dozen megs of data due to random dust particles.

- Mike

Those random dust particles will destroy both the head, and the media.

--
Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I've got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

hmm.. well I guess its a lost cause.

- Mike

Is 10GB modern? Recently i was cleaning up my junk box and inspecting data on old drives. There was this 2002 10GB drive going to be junked. Just for fun i opened it and let it run for a while in my very dusty shack, doing some copy and chkdsk actions. No problems seen in event log, although i guess i should have tried some SMART tools to read out the health status.

After half an hour or so the fun was over and i junked the drive.

There is a filter inside every drive. Dust will be collected in that filter very soon after startup. Besides, the drive is already defective so what's to lose?

I think that with the proper tools and careful work in a relatively clean enviroment (bathroom), you could very well try to repair the drive and stand a good chance. Although I would start with building the disk pack in a working same model drive, and not changing heads.

--
Joop van der Velden - pe1dna@amsat.org

I agree - give it a try. Whatever happens you will learn something and if you keep us informed, so will we.

I have run a defective travelstar for a few hours with the top off. It does kill the drive in the end, but you might have enough time to get some data off.

To change the heads you will almost certainly have to dismantle the disc stack and remove the head assembly from its mounting.

Before doing anything so drastic, are you sure that the control pcb has not been damaged? You could try swapping that first before opening the drive housing.

John

Well..... if you fancy doing it just for fun, I've seen drives with 'issues' being sold on ebay. Nearly bought one myself just so I could try swapping the controller board.

Graham

Dust issues aside, how do you know the heads are the problem? If the heads have crashed, the disk surface is likely to be scarred up too.

On Sun, 08 Oct 2006 21:36:49 -0400, Michael Kennedy Has Frothed:

Forget it.

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

Only in a small place I'd expect.

Graham

It's worth a try as an experiment. I really doubt you'll be successful. A couple of hints - the parts hdd is required to be EXACTLY identical. As previously mentioned try the PCB swap first - after verifying the parts drive is a good drive.

I would suggest finding 3 or 4 hdd's to practice on before you try the one you are attempting to recover from.

btw a head stack swap on a laptop drive is extremely difficult due to the physical size.

Usually a whole head-width of tracks get scraped up. 40 to 80 tracks.

and as soon as the new heads go over the bad spot you're likely to have a second set of bad heads.

was

You may of course be right but since it's just for interest value why not give it ago ?

Graham

I'm sure some or most of it is on the level of "urban legend". An idea, which may have some truth if worked in some circles moves out into the mainstream, where someone knows a guy who did it. But by the time it gets to that point, much of the information is stripped off.

Remember, it used to be "change the boards and that will fix the drive". I still see people looking for specific types of drives for this sort of thing. We don't really ever hear about whether they are successful. (Actually, someone did ask here about it some months back, and we did learn it didn't work.)

So maybe the board switching worked at some point (especially before IDE drives), or maybe it just worked in some cases. But people grasp at straws, so they still look for identical drives (of course, once they start buying junkers, how do they know the "new" drive is working enough to be a transplant donor?).

Someone hears something, finds something about changing heads, and that's the way to go.

Because for most people, this is shotgunning the problem. They aren't evaluating the problem, they are trying to impose solutions on it in the hopes that something will fix the problem.

Michael

From my years of using a bathroom as a darkroom, dust is pretty prevalent even there. But if you vacuum every surface first, including walls and ceilings, you cut it way down.