hard drive repair

Check the following thread about a week ago. I hope others have some suggestions to help you...

Sorry, there is no way in H*** that you will be successful if you open the drive in whatever you might call a cleanroom, let along trying to swap the platters. And do check out that recent thread referenced in another posting.

This might have worked with 20 MB harddrives in the early days of the PC (and even that is very questionable), but no way, no how, with anything recent.

If the data is very valuable, have a data recovery service make the attempt.

Else, chalk it up to lessons learned (about backup).

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Important: Anyth> Hi,

However, the drive concerned here is only a 200MB drive, so no rocket science. You might just make it work long enough to recover the data. I'd guess some blowing of clean, canned air while closing the drive will also help.

--
Met vriendelijke groet,

   Maarten Bakker.

Actually he said 200Gb.. so it might be asking a bit much :) I did this once on a 4 or 6 gig drive that had seized up, held it sideways to minimize dust falling in and just broke the platters free by hand. It didn't have anything I really needed on it, just some nice to have stuff, so I figured I'd try it since it was on its last legs obviously... it actually worked fine and continued to as a testing drive for a while before I turfed it, although I'm sure if I had done a surface scan some errors would have been found here and there...

The only chance you have is to try to free the stuck motor by hand. It might spin up if you give it a push start. Sometimes the heads stick to the platters and prevent the motor from starting, but once broken free it will work. There's no chance a platter swap will work. If you get the drive to spin up, copy the files quickly starting with the important ones. It probably won't work long enough to copy the whole drive. If you can't live without the data, then spend the $2500. Anything you do will render the drive completely unrecoverable.

Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@psu.edu

Hi...

Given that he's already opened it, I'd give him about the same odds of getting data off it now as less than winning every lottery this week. :)

If it were me and mine I'd have been inclined to try to run it up by removing it from the machine, holding it in one of my hands, and giving it a sharp bump or two on the side with the heel of my hand while power was applied.

Used to work back in the old mfm and rle stiction days.

Take care.

Ken

My impression is that the relative position of the platters on a hard drive is critical to their operation. I think your chance of success here is zero.

You would have better luck seeing if you could do anything about whatever is locking up the old bearings. Even then your odds are slim, just because of the almost certainty of introducing dirt into the drive, but slim odds are better than zero odds.

-

----------------------------------------------- Jim Adney snipped-for-privacy@vwtype3.org Madison, WI 53711 USA

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(WD2000JB).

and

I'm

2

them

I've never seen one where the spindle motor actually locked up, that's interesting. Once you've opened the drive though there's little chance of being able to recover the data and if you swap the platters into another drive it most certainly won't work. I really doubt you'll be able to align the platters with anywhere near the extreme precision that would be required even if you do somehow manage to put them in without destroying the heads and at that point even in the cleanest room of your house you've still got a drive full of dust.

minimize

An easier way to fix "stiction" which I haven't seen since the days of 20mb MFM drives is to briskly spin the drive itself along the axis of the spindle, that'll usually break it free without having to open it up. Some old drives even had an exposed rotor on the bottom that you could spin by hand.

20mb

I'd actually tried that, but this drive was a little too well stuck for that to work I guess. I had another drive (an old 80 meg laptop Seagate) whose heads would stick in the power-off position. I usually had to give it a good smack with the handle of a screwdriver (to the SIDE of the drive) to get it going if it hadn't been running in a while. They don't make 'em like that any more!

I guess this isn't likely to work now that the drive's been opened, but I've had surprisingly good luck with dead drives by putting them into a static bag, sealed up with tape, and leaving them in the freezer overnight! This has worked for 2 out of 3 drives I've tried it on, whether it was just coincidence or dumb luck (or combinations of the two!). Anyway, when there's nothing to lose, you get all kinds interesting thoughts on how to revive that drive one last time ;)

"JM" wrote in news:%d9Me.75313$ snipped-for-privacy@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca:

Did you spin them up cold or keep them in the bag, allow them to warm up, before spinning them up?

I would think that spinning them up cold would [at least in Louisiana] guarantee condensing water inside and making a real mess of everything.

--
bz

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an 
infinite set.

bz+sp@ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu   remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

I think the heads might be stuck, I consider this more likely than the bearings failing in a way that would stop the motor.

I discovered that on some drives (~2GB), the platters have a slight texture near the middle where the heads land, whereas they are shiny and flat elsewhere. I found that the friction of the heads on the platters is much greater when the heads are not on the textured bit. Are your drive's heads at the inner region of the platter? If not, perhaps that is why it won't start. The question would then be whether you can get the heads to the middle without causing catastrophic damage.

I found that even with the lid off, the drive worked for a while, maybe enough to copy a few files.

Good Luck!

Chris

You have to spin them up cold, that's the whole point. I haven't had trouble with condensation yet but then I don't live in a particularly humid place. Still even when it works you usually only get a few minutes before it conks out again so you have to copy off the important stuff ASAP.

If the hard drive works at cold temperature, it looks like the circuit board has cold solder joints. I will try to re-solder all solder joints on the circuit before put it into fridge.

up,

trouble

conks

board

That's not what the freezer does, getting the drive cold affects the properties of the IC's themselves as well as it can change the physical alignment of the mechanical portion of the drive slightly. I've had some luck with the freezer trick but I've never found cold solder joints on a drive.

"James Sweet" wrote in news:yGSMe.18888$Rp5.2710@trnddc03:

It also causes differential shrinkage of bearings, etc., and could unbind something that was stuck.

--
bz

please pardon my infinite ignorance, the set-of-things-I-do-not-know is an
infinite set.

bz+sp@ch100-5.chem.lsu.edu   remove ch100-5 to avoid spam trap

"Ben Galvin" bravely wrote to "All" (14 Aug 05 11:13:24) --- on the heady topic of "hard drive repair"

BG> Subject: hard drive repair BG> Xref: core-easynews sci.electronics.repair:339614

BG> I'm trying to repair my crashed 200Gb Western Digital hard disk BG> (WD2000JB). A few days ago it started making a strange buzzing noise, BG> then about 10 minutes later died completely.

Perhaps the bearing seized or the motor driver IC fried.

BG> Ok, so I figured I may as well have a go myself - nothing to lose. I BG> setup up a 'clean room' in my bathroom (cleaned it out, used an ion BG> generator and the hot steam from the shower to temporarily settle the BG> dust down). I know its nothing compared to a professional one, but BG> it's the best I can do. I opened the hard drive for about 30 seconds, BG> enough to determine that the platters couldn't be moved around by BG> hand. I opened another similar hard drive (with no data on it) and was BG> able to move the platters easily, so I'm assuming there must be BG> something wrong with the bearings in the hard disk.

Drives often have a locking mechanism to keep the platters from spinning when the heads are parked, so not being able to move it by hand may be normal and doesn't necessarily mean the bearing is seized.

BG> I've managed to BG> get hold of another (almost) identical motor/bearing assembly, and I'm BG> going to have a go at swapping them over. BG> My problem is that my hard drive has 2 platters inside it (basically BG> like 2 CDs stacked on top of each other with a 1cm gap between them), BG> but I don't know if I need to ensure that they stay perfectly aligned BG> when I moved them to the new spindle or not (imagine rotating the top BG> cd around a vertical axis by 10 degrees - the data would no longer be BG> sychronised between the 2 platters). There are no marks or holes to BG> tell the orientation of the platters, so it would be very hard to take BG> them both off one spindle, and put them on to the new one and preserve BG> this relationship exactly. BG> Does anyone know if I need to do this, or have any other advise?

One of the platters has clock pulses written it at the factory which allows the servos to detect the position. Unfortunately the other platter is mechanically attached so it would be remotely next to impossible to realign the positions of the 2 platters correctly again. One would need to align them radially with pico-degree precision or about 1,000,000,000,000 times smaller than the width of a hair. As one might guess swapping 2 platters is not a kitchen table top experiment. Even a data recovery service wouldn't attempt what you propose!

Cough up the big bucks for the recovery service or kiss your data goodbye.

A*s*i*m*o*v

... Well I defragged my TV and went all the way back to basic cable!