[NLRS] FW: OT: Hard Drive recovery?

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

Back when 40 mb was a big drive, there was tendency for drives that ran 
a long time to not start spinning when powered up from cold. I think it 
came from the heads being parked at the outside edge of the platters and 
the combination of heat and billions of revolutions had moved the disk 
surface wax lubricant to the edge and the head out there would stick the 
drive. The temporary solution there was at power up to shake the drive 
with a twisting motion approximating the platter spin axis. Usually that 
would wiggle the heads and break the wax stickiness and the drive would 
run until left to cool.

73, Jerry, K0CQ

On 6/29/2010 10:10 PM, Bruce Richardson wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
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