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Data Storage Hardware

Resurrecting Dead Harddrives? 161

Posted by Cliff from the perform-at-your-own-risk dept.
Broue Master asks: "The main harddrive of a friend's computer stopped working. He described to me that the computer began by emitting strange 'scratching sounds', and after a while, it made a 'loud *tock* sound' and stopped. He tried to reboot it but soon realized that the harddrive wasn't spinning anymore. He asked me if I could revive it, at least long enough so that he could retrieve at least his "my documents" folder. The computer was running XP. I did a little googling(tm) of my own to find out that the most recommended solution out there seems to be 'freezing' the harddrive for a day in a ziplock bag. I'd like to know what fellow Slashdot readers have done in the past to try and resurrect dead harddrives and if the freezing method would still be a good idea, today. The harddrive is a Samsung 30Gb." A good 95% of the time, once an HD is gone, break out the shovel, because it's time to bury it. Still, it would be interesting to note, if only from an anecdotal standpoint, if any of you have managed to perform such miracle hardware resurrections. Have you managed to revive a dead and decaying drive from the dead long enough to pull data off of it? If so, what did you do?
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Resurrecting Dead Harddrives? More

Resurrecting Dead Harddrives?

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  • Freeze first, then (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SpaceLifeForm ( 228190 ) on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:37PM (#8382308)
    try finding an identical drive and swap the electronics.

    • Re:Freeze first, then (Score:5, Funny)

      by DA-MAN ( 17442 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @01:05AM (#8383024) Homepage
      Cryogenically freeze it now and maybe in thirty or fourty years it will be cheap to take it to a data recovery company, cure what ails it and what not.

    • Re:Freeze first, then (Score:5, Informative)

      by XenonOfArcticus ( 53312 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @01:08AM (#8383056) Homepage
      I've done the brain swap successfully before (about 10 years ago). I have heard anecdotally since then that this may not work with more modern drives that may store calibration data in non-volatile storage on the electronics board. I can't confirm if this is true.

      I've never tried freezing one. I think I'd try a brain swap first, as it's unlikely to cause physical harm. I can't say the same for the freeze operation for sure. If you do freeze it, put a bunch of dessicant (silica gels) in with the drive for a few days beforehand. You don't want moisture in with the drive freezing, expanding and damaging something.

      • Re:Freeze first, then (Score:5, Informative)

        by twilightzero ( 244291 ) <mrolfs.gmail@com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:46AM (#8383578) Homepage Journal
        I can say authoritatively that swapping boards on newer drives does NOT work - I used to do tech support for Western Digital. The problem becomes that a chip on the board holds the other half of the calibration data that's embedded on the platter at factory low level format time. So in a sense every drive is individually tuned to a point where only that controller card will work with that body. I've heard about it being done successfully with drives having the same model, sub model, firmware rev, very close s/n's, etc. I wouldn't reccommend it at all. Also if you brain swap the drive, you lose all warranty on both the drives (yes they can tell). I agree with the first poster, get a shovel and bury it because it's dead or send it out for data recovery. If the data means ANYTHING to you then don't try home methods, they're liable to get you into a far worse situation drive-wise.
        • don't forget the Lube. My office spent $2200 to recover less than 10 MB of data off a drive hit in a power outtage.

        • Re:Freeze first, then (Score:5, Informative)

          by technos ( 73414 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @06:23AM (#8384265) Homepage Journal
          Unfortunatly you're wrong. I've done board swaps on at least two dozen drives in the last five years, mostly antique Seagate Barracuda (swapped at least 8 of those I can think of off hand), but the line up included everything from a Micropolis full-height MFM through a slew of more modern 2-20Gb IDE drives..

          Success rate? 100% on the Barracudas, 100% on the MFM and RLL volumes, probably only 60% on the rest. A lot of the drives will not tolerate a logic board swap, but its always worth a shot if you're not going to warranty RMA the drive. (One of the successes was a recent vintage Western Digital 20G drive, which is why I was compelled to respond)

          Of course, I've also de-stuck probably 50 drives with the old "power it up, tap it against the desk during POST" trick.. That nearly always works when it won't spin up.

          PLEASE NOTE:

          My success rate is tempered by having 15 years of experience. My first recovery efforts were on Seagate 10 meg drives WHEN THEY WERE NEW. Fully 20-30% of the drives I come across are UNRECOVERABLE by any means you or I can do. Send the damn drive to Ontrack if you value your data.

          • Re:Freeze first, then (Score:3, Insightful)

            by kableh ( 155146 )
            I had a WD 120GB die on me, and I'm positive it was the controller board (pulled the board off and it looked like a burnt trace to a flash chip). I swapped boards with a friend who ordered the exact same drive the exact same day, same rev number, same model number, same build date. Didn't work.

            Then again, I've gotten an older laptop drive to work again by swapping boards. But the anecdotal evidence suggests your parent poster was correct about newer drives. I'd add that I did all of the above in the la
          • Where's your proof he's wrong?

            He said _newer_ drives.

            You've only mentioned successes with older drives.

          • 20G drives are recent?
        • "I can say authoritatively that swapping boards on newer drives does NOT work"

          Not to challenge your "authority" but... swapping boards on newer drives does indeed work (maybe not always so YMMV).

          I did this not too long ago with a Maxtor 6L040J2 40 Gig drive. Windows 2000 suddenly quit with a BSOD. Tried rebooting but the drive was toast - wasn't even recognized by the BIOS and in fact when the drive was plugged in the BIOS couldn't even recognize the CDROM (which seemed to indicate a board rather than a
    • I did this recently with a real old 500mb scsi drive - just took an identical one that was known to work and swapped the drive platter (thankfully this old drive only had one platter to deal with). You have to be extremely careful when doing this though, hard drive platters are very easy to damage. I'd reccomend using gloves of some sort to prevent getting skin oils on the platter and having plenty of antistatic plastic around to set stuff on.

  • Freezing can work (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bombcar ( 16057 ) <racbmob@bo[ ]ar.com ['mbc' in gap]> on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:39PM (#8382322) Homepage Journal
    Try it, it might free the spindle motor.

    Or try heating in an oven at about 150 degrees.

    Remember, it is dead, so anything goes. I've gotten one to live a little longer by banging it.

  • Unlikely (Score:3, Informative)

    by Graelin ( 309958 ) on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:40PM (#8382331)
    I've heard of freezing a drive and I know people that have recovered data off an overheating drive by constantly spraying some kind of cooling gel on it.

    But in this case, it sounds like drive mechanics. I'd be happy to be wrong - but I don't think you can recover a mecanical failure by just making it really cold. In fact, you'd think this would really screw with the electronics.

    • Re:Unlikely (Score:5, Informative)

      by alienw ( 585907 ) <alienw.slashdotNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @12:59AM (#8382989)
      Wrong on both counts. Cooling it and then reheating it back to room temperature causes small mechanical movements which could make the mechanism work a little longer (though it is not very likely).

      The electronics, of all things, won't give a flying crap -- every IC I have seen, including delicate DSPs and such, is rated to at least -40 degrees Celsius (datasheet [ti.com] for a TI DSP, commonly used in HDDs, look at page 130). Unless you immerse it in liquid nitrogen, it won't be a problem. I'd be more worried about water condensing on internal surfaces and such.
      • Integrated circuits may be able to take temperature extremes but some capacitors can be harmed by freezing and solder joints don't profit from going from one extreme to another and back again either.

    • Stuck bearings.... the cure (Score:5, Informative)

      by SomethingOrOther ( 521702 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @09:14AM (#8384956) Homepage

      If an old drive has been running for a long time and is switched of, we've known the bearings to stick (drive wont spin up at all)

      The fix is to hold the drive between the palms of your hands (like praying... good analogy :-)) with the axis of the drive between the heals of your hands. Then violently flick your wrists downwards untill your fingertips point to the ground.

      The idea is to spin the hard drive casing whilst causing the platters to stay still, so giving the bearings plenty of torque to free them off. It would often be enough to get this thing going again long enough to get the data off it.

      But in this case, it sounds like drive mechanics.
      Yes this does sound like heads hitting the disk. I've known people physicsly open the drive and poke at the heads (they had skipped off the disk somehow) and get it going long enough to recover data.

      Anyway, if the dude has important stuff on this disk I suggest he takes it to a profesional companny who knows what they are doing. You do have backups, dont you?

      • Another way to do this is to put it on a piece of paper on hardwood desk (the paper to glossy wood friction is fairly low, improvise here) and tap the drive on one corner so as to spin it around in a circle. Use a big desk so it doesn't fly off onto the floor.

        Doing it this way can give you a little more instantaneous torque (which is what unsticks the bearings.)

        OP: If you get it started even once, get all your data off right then and there - don't think you are going to get another chance because you mig
  • I have seen some people take the platters out of a bad drive and put them in another HD. It works, but you have to be extremly careful, as not to scratch the platters.
    • "Scratching" the platters is a non-issue. Most of the time they are made of polished Al and the magnetic element on them is pretty tough. What you have to worry about is everything from dust to finger prints. A single particle of dust in the path of the head is like a tree infront of a car.
      • I work in a research institute where we have a clean room. One of my colleagues got his drive working again by taking it apart in the clean room and putting it back together again.
        • As a testiment to this, I will vouch that this does solve the problem a lot of the time. At least for me. I've had CD-ROM drives, modems, VCRs, and god knows what else just stop working. And all I've done is take it apart, look at it, put it back together, and it will mysteriously start working again. I can't explain it. Many times I just take the cover off and that's it. Haven't tried it with a hard drive yet, but it's worth a shot and risks relatively little. And it's probably a really good idea to
    • I would consider this to be a last-resort. And an expensive one considering you're going to destroy another hard drive to attempt recovery of the bad one.

      I've done just this before myself and had hit-or-miss luck with it. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. But this was 15-20 years ago. Dust was a problem, but if you did it in a really clean environment and were careful it would minimize the risk. I'd never try it with a modern hard drive unless I had some sort of clean-room with HEPA air
      • I used to be afraid of dust, etc on drives and wouldn't have even considered running one with the case open - so my boss took an old MFM drive (ok this was a long time ago), took out the screws, popped off the case top, put it in a machine, started it up. We used it for a while watching the head arms swing back and forth, continued to use it for a while until that was boring and reassembled it and continued to use it as a regular machine.

        I was amazed at first like some sort of magic trick, but in the offi

  • Mine is dead right now (Score:4, Informative)

    by whodunnit ( 238223 ) on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:42PM (#8382354)
    Heh,

    My main drive died yesterday, turned on the computer.. wirrr, click.... wirrr, click. so i took it out of the computer and turned it upside down, gave it a little shake, and walah it spun up. I've managed to back up my data off of it now, and hopefully it'll last till the replacement drive shows up tommarow.

    • Re:Mine is dead right now (Score:2, Informative)

      by jshare ( 6557 )
      and
      walah it spun up
      Gah!

      The word (crazy frenchy characters notwithstanding) is: voila

      The next thing you know, you'll be writing "should of"....

      • fiery re-entry (Score:4, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:16AM (#8383696)
        no, no: "voila" is the *metric* spelling. in america it is "walah".

        it's people like you who cause spacecraft to fail.

      • Re:Mine is dead right now (Score:5, Funny)

        by angst_ridden_hipster ( 23104 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @03:31AM (#8383762) Homepage Journal
        Perhaps he meant "wallah" or "walla," the Hindi suffix for "one who does" or "one who deals with." Its' a good suffix for creating descriptive terms: the taxiwallah is a synonym for "cabbie," the rickshawwallah is the poor guy who carries the rickshaw, while the datawallah is the guy who flips bits for you when you write code.

        Perhaps the grandparent reference is to the "platterwallah," who spins up hard drives for the upper castes. Incidentally, while they may sound similar, the platterwallahs don't like being confused for dishwallahs, as they don't clean dishes.

  • Drop trick (Score:5, Informative)

    by HalfFlat ( 121672 ) on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:44PM (#8382372)
    Back in the days of 1GB SCSI drives ...

    Sometimes they'd get 'stuck' if they were left on for a long time (like a year or two), then turned off. At this point they wouldn't spin up, or make a half-hearted attempt to.

    If they couldn't be coaxed into moving, taking it out the enclosure and letting it drop four centimetres or so flat onto a wooden table often got them unstuck enough to grab the data and back it up.

    That said, have had some success with the same trick with newer drives with different modes of failure. Of course try the least invasive approaches first and work up, but if the drive is otherwise dead, then there's little left to lose. Unless you want to spend big dollars with a professional data recovery mob.

    • Re:Drop trick (Score:5, Funny)

      by innosent ( 618233 ) <jmdorityNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @12:05AM (#8382548)
      True, if the data is important, don't touch it, send it to the professionals. If it's just your porn collection, break out the sledgehammer, at best, you'll get your data back, at worst, and most likely, you'll have fun hitting a drive with a hammer.

      • Re:Drop trick (Score:4, Funny)

        by Molina the Bofh ( 99621 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @12:10AM (#8382590) Homepage
        True, if the data is important, don't touch it, send it to the professionals. If it's just your porn collection, break out the sledgehammer
        Who said my porn collection is not important, you insensitive clod ???!!?!!
        • Because you didn't back it up in triplicate. Shows how much you value it.

          Incidentally, I think triplicate is the magic number for ensuring long-term data integrity. If you have two copies of something, and one flips a bit, which one is right? With a third, you'll only lose data if two of them flip the same bit, or if all of them simply lose the bit to unreadability, or some combination thereof I guess.
          • If you're cheap, duplicate with checksums are better. If one bit flips in one of the backups, you will easily be able to see which one is the correct one.
        • I think the rest of the internet has backed it up for you.

      • Re:Drop trick (Score:5, Informative)

        by Oinos ( 140188 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @01:06AM (#8383037)
        Remember kids, if you're going to drop your hard drive, drop it on it's SIDE. Dropping it flat on it's top or bottom is only going to embed the heads into the platters.

        • Re:Drop trick (Score:3, Informative)

          by jhunsake ( 81920 )
          Don't even do that. Hold one end of the drive tightly in your hand. Act like you're throwing a frisbee, but don't let go.

        • stiction (Score:3, Informative)

          by obtuse ( 79208 )
          I've had good luck with stiction (drives that wouldn't spin up.) Fire up the machine with the hard drive held in your hand but connected. Then hit it gently on the side with the handle of a screwdriver a few times or until it starts spinning. This gets the heads sliding across the platters to overcome the static friction, and then the platters can spin up. The drive may only attempt to spin the platters for the first few seconds of startup, so if it doesn't work fairly quickly, power down and start again. U

          • Re:stiction (Score:4, Funny)

            by richie2000 ( 159732 ) <rickard.olsson@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @04:04AM (#8383867) Homepage Journal
            This gets the heads sliding across the platters to overcome the static friction

            Um, no. The heads never touch the platters. The stiction comes from the ball bearing grease solidifying over time, not heads sticking to the platters. Newer drives have female bearings (they're full of fluid with no balls) and don't have this problem.

          • Yes, tapping will work to free up stuck drives with stiction problems. A long time ago, I had a Quantum drive in an old Apple IIcx that was covered under extended warranty because of stiction problems in that drive model. Apple actually replaced it 18 months beyond the 1 year warranty, what a deal. But the officially recommended workaround, direct from Apple, was to tap the top of the drive casing, just above the drive heads. They said just a couple of firm taps with a fingertip as the drive powered up was
    • Not just "back in the days". In the past three months I had two WD 40GB drives go bad at work. In one case repeated power-cycles "revived" the drive long enough to copy off the couple files that weren't already on the server. In the other case I had to resort to the drop method. I dropped the machine about 5cm onto the carpet and the drive spun right up. We copied a couple files and replaced the drive.

      I also had a machine that had been sitting idle at home for quite a while (even my wife doesn't turn on th
    • I believe another trick when dealing with this issue (called striction I think?) was to smack them with a hammer bang on the spindle.

      Never tried it personally however I can imagine it would be fun.

  • if it's the Circuit board (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jaredmauch ( 633928 ) <jared@puck.nether.net> on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:46PM (#8382383) Homepage
    (Which i've seen before), you find an identical drive and swap it. Now the problem i've seen is that the PCB's have gotten more and more reliable over the years. Most drive failures I've seen recently are all physical failures inside the sealed environment. Depending on how the drive stopped working pray for no physical damage.

    hard drives are so cheap these days it might be worthwhile to do a daily rsync to help save your data. This is what I do, rsync/tar over to another system for my backups. It's nice to have a backup copy on spinning media nearby.

  • Give it a whirl (Score:5, Informative)

    by eakerin ( 633954 ) on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:49PM (#8382408) Homepage
    I had to get data off a dead drives a few times before. The drives didn't make much noise, except for not spinning up.

    To bandaid it I un-screwed the cover, and gave the platters a quick spin (make sure to only touch the SIDE of the platter, not the surface).

    I put the drive back in the PC, and it started up just fine. I then quickly copied the most important data off of that drive, and then made a copy of the entire drive to another known good one.

    • Re:Give it a whirl (Score:4, Interesting)

      by narratorDan ( 137402 ) <narratordan@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:55AM (#8383627)
      The first time I did this trick my friend's HD had stopped working, it never spun up and the heads never moved not even a *click-click*. After checking the drive with an o-scope it was determined to be a hardware issue rather than a PCB issue. So we tried dropping it on it's side to dislodge the heads but it didn't work. So as a last ditch effort I suggested that we open it up and manually free the heads or spin the platters. Since I had disassembled many dead HDs for the nice magnets on the head arms it was decided that I would be the one to do it. Once I got it open we discovered the heads were tightly wedged up onto the platter spindle! The head arm had somehow passed the stop and gotten stuck. Gently twisting the platters (put a screw into axis of the spindle and twisting it with a screwdriver) while pushing the arm back away from the spindle dislodged it. After checking to make sure that all parts were moving freely and that everything was secure we powered it up and bingo! Kinda neat watching a HD operate. Put the lid back on and he backed up all his data and eventually used that drive for another two years problem free! Pretty amazing since the whole operation took place on his bedroom floor not a clean room in sight.

      NarratorDan

      • Re:Give it a whirl (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jamesh ( 87723 )
        We've all seen the pictures... the distance between the read head and the platter compared to a grain of dust, a smoke particle, a human hair etc.

        The nifty thing is, the drives spin fast enough that with some luck all this stuff will just fly outwards and get stuck in the filter before it comes into contact with the heads.

        My Dad used to teach basic competency in word processing and spreadsheet use etc (back in the day... 80286 and wordperfect 5.1 :) He had 'demo' computer and used a harddrive with some ba
      • The odds are far against you these days with the higher density drives.

        You might get lucky with an old 20GB drive, but try it on a 320GB unit and you're 99.9% certian to have a bad drive within an hour if not immediately.
        • The odds are far against you these days with the higher density drives.

          You might get lucky with an old 20GB drive, but try it on a 320GB unit and you're 99.9% certian to have a bad drive within an hour if not immediately.

          Judging from the success rates for window modding of hard drives, you're 100% certain to have a bad drive if you try it on anything larger than a 10GB disk.

  • Dead eh. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:50PM (#8382421) Journal
    Well if it's dead, and the data isn't very important, time for drastic measures.

    It sounds like a mechnical problem, a head crash that went as far as pulling the head right off the arm, and wedging it between the platters, or the bearings died.

    Freezing it won't hurt anything, but beware condensation when you take it out of the freezer.

    I'd recommend getting in the cleanest room you can, preferably with high humidity to reduce dust.

    Take off the cover and look for metal shavings in the inside. If there are no metal shavings visible, then the bearings have gone, and you might as well give up.

    If there are metal shavings, then there's a chance you can recover data. Try to move the platters/heads, if the heads aren't in the landing zone, then this WILL damage the platters (a little).

    If the top head is the bad one, you are lucky. Try to rig it in a way so the platters can turn again. If it's a head between other platters, you are going to have to pull the platters out, which is not easy at all.

    Anyway, if the data is worth more than $1000 to you, then send it to a professional recovery service. I don't think an electronics board swap will help anything in your case. It would only waste time and money.

    Doing any and all of the above things may damage the disk more than it already is. You've been warned.

  • Tick Tick Tick BOOOM Dead (Score:3, Informative)

    by Unholy_Kingfish ( 614606 ) on Tuesday February 24, 2004 @11:57PM (#8382479) Homepage
    Once you get the ticking, clicking, and screeching sounds you might be out of luck. Mechanical failures tend to destroy the actual data on the platters. Heads crash, bearing explode or shred leaving metal shaving on the platters and cause physical damage. Some recovery is possible, but rarely total recovery.

    Most big data recovery operations keep new units of every type and model of hard drives around for recovery. If you had an armature go, they pull your platters out of your drive, and put them in EXACTLY the same make and model HD in their clean room and try to recover the data with standard software. You could try and do this yourself but buying EXACTLY the same make model and series of drive. But opening up one of these units while not in a clean room is not a good idea.

    For sector damage, non physical damage, there are tons of tools like this [data-recov...ftware.net] and this [uneraser.com] out there that might help. But sometimes the damage to the MBR and backup MBR are so bad that recovery tools might not be able to make sense of the bits. I have one sitting right here that is like that. Somehow the bits got shredded over the ENTIRE disk. I assume there was a physical malfunction that dragged the head across the platters and made Swiss cheese of it.

  • I've frozen them before (Score:2, Informative)

    by spudgun ( 39016 )
    During the Fujitsu Fiasco....
    I froze my HDDs when recovering data on a marginal drive, those drive had a heat expansion problem on their chips so freezing gave me a longer time to copy data to a new drive.

    I use Slackware install CDs to copy the data off

    1 Remove and chill HDD
    2 Install new HDD and format
    3 plug up old HDD on secondary Interface (sometime better as a slave does)
    4 boot Slackware CD (CD-ROM on primary)
    5 mkdir /mnt2 ; mount /dev/hda1 /mnt ;mount /dev/hd[cd]1 /mnt2 ; cd /mnt ; cp -a /mnt2/* .

    if
    • Replace step 5 with:

      mkdir /mnt2
      mount /dev/hda1 /mnt
      mount /dev/hdc1 /mnt2
      rsync -av /mnt1/ /mnt2/

      The advantage is that rsync will cheerfully resume where it left off if the drive is goofed to the point that you can't copy it in one pass. Just repeat the process as necessary, and each time rsync will copy a bit (well, hopefully more than one bit) more.

  • Identical drive and swap platters. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Wardish ( 699865 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @12:09AM (#8382581) Journal
    From the sound of it it was a nasty head crash.

    If the value is high enough send it to a qualified recovery company. If your willing to risk it and you have the tools, swap the platters from the bad drive to an identical known good drive.

    Odds of getting it running with cold or hot is low considering the reported noises.

    Qualified recovery company figure 100% they get data and probably about 90% of it. Odds of switching platters yourself and getting most of your data figure 60%, odds of using cold (freezer) or heat (it can work...) 30% or so.

    BTW if you do the freezer make sure and bag it. You don't want a lot of nice humid air on your drive when it's nice and chilly.

    Now back to my Thorazine...mmmm thooraaaszzzzzhhhh....

  • Try this. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Tooxs ( 56401 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @12:24AM (#8382701)
    Take the drive out and have cables long enough to set the drive flat on a smooth non conductive surface, like a bench or table top. Turn the system on and give the drive a quick spin about a quarter turn around the axis of the platter, then listen to see if it spins up. If it was just a sticky spin motor it might let go, if it does, try and get your stuff asap. I've recovered data on a few drives like that. I've had a couple were this worked once but not twice, so you shouldn't press your luck. It's a long shot, but it gives quick easy results if it works.
    • If the heads are stuck to the platters, it works exactly as the parent comment says. Just jerk the drive case sharply so that the case rotates around the platter axis. This should break the platters free. After that, you may not have much time. Be quick about copying the data. This has worked for me on several occasions (but that was a long time ago, now Western Digital drives are much more reliable).
      • Alternatively, if the force required to unstick the heads from the platters is greater than the force holding the heads to their positioning arms, the head(s) will be torn off and make all sorts of interesting noises as they spin around.

        This is some of the idea behind the extreme changes in temperature... to try and reduce the force sticking the heads to the platter.

    • Re:Try this. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by DaoudaW ( 533025 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @01:57AM (#8383351)
      I had a laptop which had been too long in a monsoon climate. I opened the case and took out the drive and gave it the jerky 90 degree turn a few times, quickly plugged it back in and voila it spun up. Not having a replacement drive I just kept using it. After opening the case several times I realized that I could just give the laptop the same spin and the drive would spin up. Eventually I opened the foil cover on the drive case and stuck the drive in a dry place (a ziplock bag with several fresh silica gel packets) for a few days. Last time I tried it was still working.

  • DriveSavers (Score:5, Informative)

    by gabe ( 6734 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @12:32AM (#8382782) Homepage Journal
    www.drivesavers.com [drivesavers.com]

    • Re:DriveSavers (Score:2, Interesting)

      by KhanAFur ( 693723 )
      The place I worked at had pretty good luck with drivesavers. We have sent them hard drives that were damaged in fires (circuit boards completely toasted and platters soaked in water from putting out the fire) and had them recover the majority of the data off from them. It is a high price for the average joe but is worth it when you really need it.

    • Re:DriveSavers (Score:4, Informative)

      by afidel ( 530433 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:05AM (#8383392)
      Very good (98+% recovery from a fleet of dead Hitachi drives in one departments Thinkpad laptops) but NOT cheap. I think the typical bill was a couple thousand dollars to have couple day service with DVD's shipped back to us.

      • Re:DriveSavers (Score:2, Informative)

        by cybotix ( 605849 ) *
        drive recovery companies in asia can do it for a lot cheaper. if you are located in asia you might actually consider it a financially viable option.

  • don't freeze it... (Score:3, Informative)

    by theIG ( 647290 ) <kyle@interstellarglue.com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @12:41AM (#8382851) Homepage
    a friend of mine said that he has saved the data of many people in the same situation by leaving the HD in the backseat of his car while he is at work on a sunny day. When he gets home, sometimes the heat will let it spin up just long enough to pry away any salvagable data. I know for sure that it has worked for him at least 3 times.
    -kyle
    • I've done this quite a few times, posted to alt.hackers about it in 1997 [google.com]. Ovens work really well too, just heat the drive up to about 150 degrees or so. You want it hot enough to be uncomfortable to hold, but not hot enough to melt the electronics. Toaster ovens work but beware of how close the heating elements are.

      This is most useful on drives that have died of stiction, where the drive motor doesn't have enough torque to overcome the gummed up lubricants and worn bearings.

  • Freezer Believer (Score:5, Funny)

    by candl ( 68944 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @01:04AM (#8383022)
    I had a dead drive that I kept around for a year just in case some miracle recovery cure came up. Sure enough I heard about the freezing thing and six months ago broke out the HD, stuck it in a plastic bag (in hopes of tricking any condensation into adhering to the other surface) and threw it in the freezer while I went and "prepped my system" for getting a drive in and fired up asap.

    On the first attempt I had put the drive in the freezer for only about 20 minutes (hey, I was anxious) and it fired up. I browsed to the drive's directory before it crapped out on me, but I knew I was close. So the drive went back in the freezer while I thought of plan B.

    On the Second attempt I left the drive chill for 45 minutes and this time when I took it out, I brought it out on a frozen gel pack. I was able to get all my data w/o condensation or other complications.

    I'd like to say that my data was fine, but somewhere along the line my poetry and stories really started to really suck. It must have been corrupted at some point because I swear it was better when I wrote it. Hopefully your data will retain it's value...
    • Another vote for freezing here, if you've got nothing to lose. I had a hard drive die at work, and while we were pretty sure there was everything had been backed up I decided to try freezing anyway -- partly to be sure, partly out of curiosity.

      I had the same behaviour as you: you get working data for a while, then you start getting errors and you need to put it in the freezer again. I was surprised at how well it worked, though.

      No word from the guy whose drive it was; should've got him to check his c

  • This seems like something that would take an excorsism to fix, but I have an 80GB drive that was in a server running windows 2000 (not my first choice, mind you, the new server is a Fedora core 1 box) that experianced an undue amount of heat and has proven to be a pain to revive. On one attempt the drive claims 800 GB in size and another it claims an 8 MB size, however I was once able to mount one of the partitions through Linux (alot of good it did, turns out all I recovered was a useless windows 2000 sys

  • it's dead jim... (Score:3, Informative)

    by joelja ( 94959 ) * on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:21AM (#8383455)
    The sound described is highly indicative of either spindle seizing or a head crash. neither is something you're likely to recover from.... it's possible if the spindle has seized that a strong lateral motion when it's powered on might break the disk free and allow it to spin up again.

    So you can power it back on and clonk it into something but I wouldn't hold out a whole lot of hope.

  • A comment on freezing. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stvangel ( 638594 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @02:53AM (#8383616)
    This can be a (very) temporary fix with a drive that's having problems with the electronics. Often if components are flaking out but haven't actually fried, they'll run when they're cold but die when they heat up. Get it cold and then power it up and work fast. You'll probably only have a few minutes at a time though. The same applies to motherboards, chips, and memory. To give you more time, you should probably set everything to as low speed and low voltage as you can get away with. I actually did this with a machine outdoors in 15 degree weather once. The machine had been crashing during boot and I couldn't get another machine to recognize the drive's data format ( it was a strange integrated controller on the motherboard ). Outside it booted and ran for two hours while I copied all the data over a long ethernet cable I'd ran out a window. Turned out to be the motherboard. After a replacement with something a little more generic and a reformat, I copied everything back to the drive and it was fine.

    Granted this probably has nothing to do with your current drive problems. It sounds like it blew chunks with physical problems. Even if you could get it working again I'd bet you've got significant platter and/or head damage and any data you could get off it would have serious corruption issues. Scratching noises and loud thumps coming from hard drives are never good things.

  • Crashing HD: scratch-scratch scratch-scratch ... *tock* .

    Data recovery firm: *cha-ching!*

    ;-D

  • Revivals (Score:3, Interesting)

    by richie2000 ( 159732 ) <rickard.olsson@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @04:20AM (#8383918) Homepage Journal
    I'm currently looking at the output from the demo of Stellar Phoenix [stellarinfo.com] and it looks like it can pull most of the data off a IBM Deathstar (yes, I know, but I did the firmware upgrade a long time ago and it looked like it was going to pull through) with a 46GB NTFS partition. The drive does the click of death and although Windows sees the partition, it could not find a file system.

    Norton DiskDoctor told me to take it out and shoot it because it was suffering. Partition Expert didn't even want to make a raw copy of it and Partition Magic just laughed at me.

    If the drive isn't even spinning up and stopped after a *thonk*, the only options are to send it off for a wallet-cleaning, or open it up and see what happened. My guess is some kind of head crash or catastrophic bearing failure in which case your friend is pretty much SOL with regards to option #2. He should have made a backup immediately when it started making those noices. Live, learn.

  • If you(r friend) really need the data and have no recent backup, call a professional data rescue company and pay them some 100 dollars to get the files back from the harddisk (that's how laptop "backups" are done at the company I work for - not very clever, but it avoids thinking about a backup strategy). Don't make the problem worse by fiddling with the drive, it will make the job harder for those people who know how to read from a broken drive.

    If the data is not that important that you are willing to pay

    • Note that there's nothing wrong with going to a data recovery firm, even if you're a knowledgeable techie. Data recovery companies are not the computer shop on the corner -- they have cleanrooms and sets of replacement parts for every drive you can think of. They can disassemble your drive and swap in a new mechanism.

      Note that simple on-site backups are worth it. Data recovery can run up into the thousands of dollars, a backup hard drive (even just mirroring your crucial files) costs $100, and you are
  • Ok, this does not answer the initial question, but:

    Better than any method of data recovery is to have a look at your system log or the S.M.A.R.T. values of your drive as long as it's alive and to look out for signs of impending doom.

    That way you can backup your important data (music, divx-videos, ...?) before everything fails!

    It's quite strange when you hear someone complaining that his important data is lost, and "oh, yes, it made those funny noises for half a year!"
  • It worked for me (and by IBM 30 G drive). One day the disk began with the klonk sounds that many IBM drive owner know about. It was no longer accessible. It was under warrenty, but there was no way I was sending it back before having the data wiped.

    I decided to try the freeze method (froze it for about 2 hours) and it worked, though I had to turn the drive up-side down aswell.

    After the "treatment" the drive actually ran another few months, before it finally died completly.

    • That's interesting... I got mine to work (long enough to recover data) by putting it on it's side and cooling it with a big fan. I also found linux had an easier time dealing with the disk (when damaged) than windows. So, I booted with a live cd and used linux utils for the "repairs" and recovery.

  • dd_rescue is great for copying from flaky drive (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Danny Rathjens ( 8471 ) <slashdot2.rathjens@org> on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @06:03AM (#8384210)
    dd_rescue [garloff.de]

    It is similar to dd, but it does not exit on I/O errors. So it is perfect for pulling as much data as possible from a bad drive. It also has a nifty optimization wherein it uses 16kB blocks to copy until it gets an error, then it goes down to 512 byte blocks so it can get as close to the corrupted sectors as possible.

    I just used this to recover all but 500kB of data from a 120GB drive that went bad. The method was simple, albeit long:

    • Buy new 250GB drive(WD 7200rpm 8MB cache for $160 from Best Buy(stupid $90 rebate)
    • fdisk, mkfs, mount new drive on /mnt/new
    • dd_rescue -A /dev/hdc1 /mnt/new/home.ext3 (-A so it fills in any errors with zeroes)
    • wait many hours(did my taxes, :)
    • fsck -p /mnt/new/home.ext3
    • mount home.ext3 /mnt/loop -o loop
    • cp -a /mnt/loop/* /mnt/new
  • 1. Disassemble the drive
    2. Throw away everything but the platters
    3. Dust off your electron microscope ...oh, wait. Nevermind.

  • External HD copier (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bushcat ( 615449 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @08:46AM (#8384792)
    I use an external hardware-based HD copier made by Century. It's OEM'd to someone in the US but I don't know who. Basically, plug any drive into one side, plug any into the other, push a button and it rapidly clones one to the other. It also has a USB2 connection. When connected to a PC, it can be used to mirror an internal drive, clone it or simply be an external drive.

    Since it's standalone, it can clone a non-bootable drive. It also seems to be able to clone drives that are too damaged to spin up in a PC.

    Recent rescues:

    60GB 2.5-inch drive would spin up intermittently. Attached it to the external box, where it had the same problem. So I removed the lid, and got the drive to spin up with a thumb twist on the central boss. I got the drive cloned in 20 minutes, and the drive continued to work for another 40 minutes.

    Fujitsu with the (in)famous circuit board problem: Got a replacement drive. Cloned an identical functional drive from another machine in the office onto it. Swapped the circuit board on the functional drive to the non-functional one. Drive started, so cloned it to the original functional drive.

    The Century unit has been worth its weight in gold to me over the years. The newest one is smaller & lighter. Around $150.

  • The quote was too expensive UK699 for just family photos.

    What was interesting was the noises it made after it came back were very different to those that it made before.

    Does any one know what they really do in these labs? Is it worth me opening it to see if they have left disconnected cables?

    Neil

  • The poor man's clean room? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geoswan ( 316494 ) on Wednesday February 25, 2004 @11:40AM (#8386346) Journal
    I read a discussion of resurrecting dead drives on Usenet, years ago. Various correspondents then, as now, recommended putting the drive in the freezer. I came across the term "stiction" for the first time.

    And somebody recommended that, if you felt it was necessary to open the drive, you could build yourself an impromptu clean room quite easily... They recommended that one put on one of those flashlights that strap to your head and put your head and torso in a brand new garbage bag. They argued that not only would it be clean and dust free in there, but that the slight static charge from opening the bag would attract all the dust that came in with us to the bag.

    I dunno. I have thought about trying this. Never had an occasion. What about the static from the bag zapping the drive's electronics? If you hold the drive at all times can you be sure you and the drive will be mutually grounded?

  • My solution required purchasing a software, but $60.00 was well worth the $300 dollars I charged the client. The software rebuilds the FAT on all readable data. www.runtime.org is the site and GETDATABACK is the product.
  • Make a bootable floppy with a batch file that XCOPYies (no replace) the critical data from the drive (e.g MYDOCU~1) to some other device.

    Power down, power up. It's a little bit like a crapshoot:

    If you power up and hear 'the click of death', power down, try again.
    If you hear a normal drive startup, you should be ok for a few files, the AUTOEXEC.BAT is going to pull out a few files-- maybe get stuck on a bad sector, mash the [I]gnore button repeatedly to skip over them.
    When the drive freezes up again, s

  • First off, freeze it real good. When I first tried this, I didn't get it cold enough, so it died again before I could get much data. I was lucky that my drive gave me multiple chances at it, as usually you only get one.

    If freezing it doesn't get it working, drop it onto a hard flat surface. Sometimes this will free up whatever is stuck.

    As a last resort, try banging on the drive while the computer is running. You might be lucky and get it spinning again.

    If none of the above work, you can either void t

  • Questionable Ethics Fix (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jcayer ( 206087 )
    My father's hard drive crashed a few years ago and we decided to send it to some data recovery place. They said all the data was recoverable but wanted an absurd amount to do that. I figured, they got it working, so I said no thanks and asked for the drive to be returned. They sent it back and sure enough, It worked and I got all his data off it. All for the diagnosis fee of something like $100.
  • Did you jiggle the handle? Give it a good whack? Use a large industrial magnet? Rub it vigorously against your dog's back?

  • Swapped Controller Board (Score:2, Interesting)

    by harryk ( 17509 )
    A few years back, while working for a third party support firm (read: couple of guys with computer know-how) we sold a bunch of computers. Identical to each other as possible. I remember one day, one of the insurance companies we worked for called us, and asked about drive recovery. He explained what had happened, and we pretty much told him the drive was a gonner, although covered under the hardware warranty.

    This was completely unacceptable to the client. So we began to dig out the drive and popped it

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