Reviving A Dead Hard Drive The Hard Way

An anonymous reader writes "This guy went to the trouble of swapping logic boards on a dead hard drive to get his NeverWinter Nights save games back and took photos." I would have just used a character editor to get my stuff back, but clearly, I lack the dedication this gentleman has. Regardless of reason, nice work!

Kids, there's a lesson in this

[Raul654]

RPGs: They kill. [wired.com] They ruin lives [yahoo.com]. Just say no.

That guy sure has his priorities right

[SUPAMODEL]

Now, I wonder if I can make use of the warranty on the original drive.........
In other news: how long before he's swapping logic boards on the webserver?

heh.

[pb]

I had to do something similar with some wet floppy disks back in the day. (backups, I hear you say? Those *were* my backups!)

Re:Appropriate Quote

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope she's not an English teacher.

Re:been there, done that.

[krumms]

I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..

Blindfolded. As did any respectable man back then. And we liked it.

Re:been there, done that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, we know you were lying. ;)

Re:been there, done that.

[IIRCAFAIKIANAL]

Uphill, both ways, at 30 degrees below zero with 3 inches of visibility.

And we liked it.

Re:2 rules of backup

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking foreward to this when I read the subject line of your post:

1. do not talk about the backup
2. do not talk about the backup...

Lame

[lucifuge31337]

That's not even close to "the hard way". Every bench tech worth their minimum wage has done this same thing more times than they can count. Execpt they usually know that you need the same firmware before they start.

I'll be impressed when someone gets fed up enough to build a clean room in their guest bathroom and recovers a drive with crashed heads.

He forgot the most important part!

[Anonymous Coward]

Put the defective logic board in the new drive and then take it back for an exchange.

Re:been there, done that.

[Raul654]

I was doing this stuff in the early 80's.
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..

Blindfolded. As did any respectable man back then. And we liked it.

--When I was your age, had to walk 40 miles through the freezing rain to get an operating system, with no shoes. And system calls?! Forget about it...

This guy is obviously crazy

[codepunk]

Who on earth would spend that type of effort just to recover a drive with XP on it...

Re:Appropriate Quote

[Grendel Frost]

I've usuall hear that quote with another line added. Real med don't do backups. But they cry often.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[psavo]

But SMART only warns you if something they can detect about to die.

So true. S.M.A.R.T did nada when a bottle of deaodorant fell onto my harddrive last year.

Re:been there, done that.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could walk? Lucky bastard!

Re:Lame

[pete-classic]

Yes, but did you take pictures, make a self-congratulatory web page, then submit it to slashdot?

It's all in the marketing.

-Peter

Re:Once Upon A Time...Any IDeas?

[eap]

Any ideas what was wrong, and how opening the sealed platter compartment might fix anything?

You probably had what we in the industry call "Data Pressure Buildup". This occurs when bits fall off your hard disk into the casing. The controller then writes new data into the spot where the old bit fell off. However, now you've got extra bits floating around in your platter compartment.

Eventually, the miscreant data starts clogging up the pressure equalization valve and the pressure in the drive increases to a point where the heads cannot read or write anymore information and are actually repelled by the media surface -- thus the clicking sound.

A quick solution is to slightly open the hard drive so the bits can escape. Just make sure you are not near any sort of data network, because the leaking bits can escape onto the Internet and cause further damage. This further illustrates the need for good internal firewall rules.

Re:Lame

[MsGeek]

Food for thought, from forgotten comedian Arte Johnson:

"The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To say what she had done.
We ignore the codfish
While the homely hen, we prize.
The moral of this story is,
IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE."

I don't know why I remembered that, but I did.

Re:This guy is obviously crazy

[really?]

it's worse than that. It's XP home...

Re:Backing up is like voting

[gfody]

thought you were going to say backing up is like voting - because nobody does it

Oh, you had an operating system?

[Population]

It's lazy kids like you that have ruined this industry. Back in my day, we didn't have operating systems.

Hell, I had to write a WYSIWYG word processor on an abacus.

And it made me a better person, I can tell you!

Re:Another idiot that can't spell "its".

[reiggin]

Thanks for the new definition of "idiot." Never knew its that simple.

Re:Lame

[HaveBlue34]

well the old drives i work on ocasionaly need a bit of 'help' to get them spining. sometimes i can just slowly increase the amps im feeding the drive with a special pwr supply i have setup but ocasionaly i just open up the hd and start it spinning by hand. Wheee!

old scsi drives

[Cheeze]

I had to revive a drive that failed after a power failure. The machine had been on for a few years straight and the old scsi drives it had used oil bearings. These bearings seize up sometimes if they are allowed to cool.

So i took the drive out of the computer and did everything you would normally do to a drive that was not spinning up, Shaking it, trying different power connectors, etc. Nothing worked. I figured there was not much damage that could be done with a little brute force, so i took a screw driver and started hammering on the side of the disk while it was plugged in. That didn't work either, so i figured it was time to use some REAL brute force. I took the drive and lifted it up about 3 feet off of the ground (still plugged in and powered up) and let it drop. That drive spun up and worked fine for another 6 months until the whole system was scrapped.

Your mileage may vary, but when it comes down to a broken drive, if it's not spinning, there's not much more damage you can do to it.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[Tralfamadorian]

No, he's saying that backing up is like voting, most people do it every four years.

Re:Oh, you had an operating system?

[Vainglorious Coward]

An abacus! We dreamed of having an abacus. We had to stand in't lake with our hands in the air, and me dad would toggle in t' boot code, in binary, by breaking us fingers. If we were lucky!

Re:Porn and never winternights

[AKnightCowboy]

No fool! You're supposed to stick the drive in the computer and drop the whole thing off the table. A good 1-2 meter drop should be sufficient to unstick that pesky drive. This works best if you balance the monitor on top of the whole thing before you drop it.

uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

"neverwinter night saves" uh huh. sure.