[NLRS] FW: OT: Hard Drive recovery?

[Bruce Richardson]

Here's the interesting reply from Scott KB0NLY with his
permission.
Bruce W9FZ

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." - Hunter S.
Thompson

-----Original Message-----
From: KBØNLY [mailto:kb0nly at mchsi.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2010 7:17 PM
To: Bruce Richardson
Subject: Re: [NLRS] OT: Hard Drive recovery?

Does the HD spin up though?  Many times the failure is mechanical,
bearing
or motor failure, head crash on the platters, scored platters,
etc..  If it's
a mechanical failure your SOL trying to do anything yourself
unless, and
this is a big unless, you have an exact model drive that works and
are
willing to do some really down home recovery work.

A few years back a failed 40gb hard drive was brought to me, after
I
preached the necessity of backup they asked what could be done
since a
couple shops quoted them hundreds of dollars.  I checked the drive
and it
turns out it wouldn't spin up, click whirr, click whirr, something
wrong in
the electronics or drive motor.  I obtained another drive of the
same make
and model off ebay, swapped the control board from the bottom of
the drive
and it still did the same thing, at this point I figured it was
the motor.
Got permission to try one last ditch thing and I pulled apart both
drives
and wearing gloves and taking my time I swapped the platters, I
realize I
don't have a clean room, and this isn't recommended to make a
working drive,
but I was able to get it to run long enough to do a copy to
another hard
drive, then discarded both drives.  Total cost of recovery was
about $50
with the donor drive.

The biggest thing is what the actual problem is, as others have
mentioned a
corrupt boot sector would cause a non-boot failure as well, but
considering
they wanted to send it out to a recovery place I assume it's a
mechanical
failure as any tech worth his name badge would be able to get data
off a
corrupt drive by connecting it to another computer.

Another trick I have used over the years is to put the drive in
the freezer
in a plastic bag for a while, let it get good and cold, this will
sometimes
free up seized drives long enough to read some data off them,
provided they
then spin up again.  At one time I had a setup where I put the
drive in the
freezer with a power and USB cable coming out of the freezer, I
would set a
laptop on the lid of the freezer and keep turning power on to the
drive
until it would spin up and start to run, then get off as much data
as
possible, as the drive warms up it would seize again.  So I would
shut off
power and let the drive get cold once again.  I was lucky enough
to get most
of the data off a few drives doing this.

She now knows the importance of data backup!  And tell her to
spend the
bucks and get a SSD drive for her laptop, well worth the
investment.

73,

Scott