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Old 02-16-2006, 10:38 AM   #1
Lakota
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Resurect dead hard drive


I am wondering, if anyone has had success on resurecting a dead hard drive. Please, I am not interested in theories, only what you have done hands on.

My delema:
60 gig Western Digital has click of death. Had a second identical drive that was working perfectly. I have read tons on the internet about what does and does not work. It is very hard to figure out who speaks from experience, and who claims to speak from experience simply to back up what they think works without any true experimentation.

From what I have read, and decided to be most believable, the rythmic clicking happens due to the heads not finding the info on the platter to give it the geographical layout of the platter and it is bouncing off a fixed stop looking for it repeatedly. Believing this, I took the route that many claim to work and swapped the pcb board on the hard drives. Tried to spin up the dead drive and it no longer even spins up. Swapped the good pcb back to the good drive and it now no longer spins up either.

Any help would be appreciated, especially from anyone who may work at a data recovery place.
 
Old 02-16-2006, 11:07 AM   #2
macemoneta
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I've successfully swapped the boards on drives to repair them, however your case is different.

When the logic dies, usually the drive becomes invisible; your controller card see no drive attached. This is a good case for a logic swap.

In your case, I've been able to revive a drive long enough to recover data by powering it up external to the PC, and hitting it sharply with the palm of my hand on a corner (to force the platter to spin). The blow needs to be inline with the orientation and direction of spin to start the drive motor. Once the drive is spinning, it should become accessible.

The clicking noise is a bad sign that the surface of the drive may have become damaged. One thing that you can try, if you have a second larger drive available is to perform an image copy to a file (filesystem in a file) using ddrescue to recover the data, then running fsck on the filesystem in the file to recover whatever files are still readable. It can take a (very) long time to do this (days):

ddrescue /dev/hdb1 /mnt/externalhd/recoveredfs
fsck -C -y /mnt/externalhd/recoveredfs

Last edited by macemoneta; 02-16-2006 at 11:11 AM.
 
Old 02-16-2006, 11:37 AM   #3
RedShirt
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Well, it all depends on just how dead it is.

Often, when I was a tech in a computer shop, for a dying drive caused by overheating, we would freeze the drive to access data long enough to make a copy. It is a pretty much 1 time shot deal, your drive is a goner though. Freezing the drive in the freezer overnight(IN A STATIC BAG...don't just put it in there naked) you can make it read long enough to transfer all the data to another drive. Works about 80% of the time in my experience. Your drive, with the clicking, this is a common symptom and how we "fixed it".
Though, as said above, in your case, you may need to "help" the drive start spinning too. Is it viewable in BIOS still?

The board swapping isn't for a dying drive like that. It is for bad boards with good platters. That isn't your case. You have either a bad motor or dying platter. In either case, probably due to overheating, when you get it up again, you may want to rethink your current system cooling setup.
 
Old 02-16-2006, 12:15 PM   #4
Lakota
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With boards swapped back to original hard drives, the previously good one no longer spins up, the previously "clicking one" still spins up and clicks. Can't say if they are recognized by bios at moment they are both out and connected via usb externally, will see after work when I have some time. Thanks for help so far.
 
Old 02-16-2006, 12:21 PM   #5
macemoneta
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If it doesn't spin up with the "working" logic card, then the drive is not identical (no matter what the markings say).
 
Old 02-17-2006, 10:03 AM   #6
Lakota
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OK, tried the freezer overnight in an anti static bag. No difference, still spins up but does not register a mount point when connected as external usb drive. I suppose it is time to give up.
 
Old 02-17-2006, 10:16 AM   #7
RedShirt
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You are left with 2 options... both of which cost thousands... Is the data worth that?
 
Old 02-17-2006, 10:43 AM   #8
macemoneta
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There is another alternative that costs only a couple of hundred or less, and guarantees that the drive will be dead in a few hours (maybe long enough to get your data).

Take a perfectly good drive (same model), and diassemble it. Remove the head assembly and the platters. Open your bad drive, move the platters to the new drive and reinstall the head assembly. You've now got a few hours to get your data, which is disintegrating second by second. You'll probably want to practice this a few times on trashbin drives. The probability of success is less than 5%. Depending on how clean you and the environment were, and how much damage had occurred before, maybe less than 1%. The only method is ddrescue in this case. You can do filesystem recovery on the image after the data is off.

The lesson here is that RAID and archival backups seem expensive options, until you look at the alternatives. Anything on a non-RAID non-archived drive is /tmp space; you must assume it can disappear at a moments notice.

Last edited by macemoneta; 02-17-2006 at 10:44 AM.
 
Old 02-17-2006, 10:54 AM   #9
Lakota
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Nope, not to me. It was a good learning process for me though. I see so many posts about this works and that works, but now at least I have a little hands on and can better understand what is believable and what is not, outside of a real pc forensics lab.

The pc and two drives I was playing with here were of an aquantance, not even a friend. Told me hard drive got funky, then would not even power up in time. He supplied an extra used hard drive in expecation. I assume the power supply was dying and the first sign was the under powered hard drive. Then when the power supply actually died, the hard drive had been under powered too long and it suffered too. Happened to my own pc a few months back, my hard drive survived........but probably has shortened its expected lifespan though. The dead pc is now working with a new power supply and another hard drive since I pooched the good one he supplied. Still don't know why(after pcb board swap no longer have power to motor on good drive), but gives me two h/d's to strip the magnets out of for use in a different hobby of mine.

Anyway, thanks for the help.
 
Old 02-17-2006, 11:16 AM   #10
exvor
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INSTANT CLEAN ROOM FOR PATTER SWTICH.
--------------------------------------
<<WARNING>>
this may not work and you might end up screwing up a perfectly good harddrive in the process. I do not accept any responsiblity for damaged materials. Do at your own risk.


Go into your bathroom and seal up all the vents and crevices. Steam up the bathroom untill you can see the steam in the air. Stop the steam and let it clear up. <--- do not use fans or anything to speed up this process. After the steam is gone it would have pulled all of the resident materials out of the air. This is now a good clean room but only for a short time. because you are in this room and possibly cause of other factors it will only stay clean for less then an hour mabye only 30 min or so. Do the patter switch.



Personally I dont recomend this solution AKA platter switch because it can destory a good drive. I also dont recomend moving the pcb to another drive cause the probelm with the other drive may damage the pcb or you may damage the pcb by moving it etc etc.. In your case the new drive not spining is a sign that the new drive is now damaged and probably for good.

there is a reason you should never move a pcb from one drive to another anyway even if its exactly the same model. At the factory they low level format the drive <--- this is not the low level format many think of tho. this is the real low level format that cannot be recreated or redone.


at the factory all drives have bad areas. a low level format programs the chip on the drive to move to a special part of the drive when a bad block is encounterd. after they do this they lock the drive. If it so happens that this bad block is in the begining of the drive you can see how this will cause issues when you move the pcb. thats why its a percentage to work to recover data.


there is no sure shot way to recover data from a patter unless you have unlimited funds or you are one of the following CIA FBI NSA GOD/AllAH/budda/???


in any case the other things i would have suggested have alredy been mentiond here freezing or dd'ing.
 
  


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