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!

Character editor? No.

[Slartibartfast]

Ummm... CN: the drive was -dead-. Ain't nothin' short of a new board that would've fixed it. (Okay -- sending the platters out for oodles of money would have, too.) Also, I don't know why this is labeled "the hard way." I've done it three times, en-toto, and it takes about ten minutes so long as you've got the correct Torx/Phillips/whatever. [Note: DON'T try doing it with the wrong tools; you'll probably just strip the head, and then it gets more fun.]

$.02...

I did the same with a few 1,6GB drives

[Kegetys]

hmm... so he switched the whole logic board?

I did the same thing with a bunch of 1,6GB western digital hard-drives a few years back, I got a pile of broken ones for free and was able to salvage 4 into working condition by changing the logic boards from those that made funny noises to those that sounded fine but the BIOS did not detect.

Dead drives.

[Slartibartfast]

Nine times out of ten, a hard drive dies because of media defects -- then you're (pretty) screwed. Sometimes, the stepper motor dies. Then, you're screwed. But, if you give it juice, and either -nothing- happens (no LEDs, etc.), or the BIOS doesn't see it, it's likeley the board. As always, troubleshoot starting with the obvious, and work toward the unlikely.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[C0vardeAn0nim0]

Actually, current drives DO warn you when they're failing.

i have 30 gig unit here that used to be on my aunt's box. i replaced it because... SMART told me it was failing.

i attached a new unit on the box, mirrored the disk and took the bad one out.

SMART is an old technology already, is present in all IDE units and all motherboards i've seen in the last 5 or 6 years, but many people ignores it. trust me, worked once for me and my aunt, so download a SMART monitor and put it running along with your lm_sensors daemon.

No Big Deal

[Anonymous Coward]

This is news? I did this when I was 4, last year.

My friend's HD went dead which had all his Palm sync data on there. I found that his HD was no longer being produced, Quantum HDs. So, I had to get one off Ebay. I could not get the correct matching model and HD size off Ebay because no one was selling it so ... I did some research on Quantum's HD whitepapers and located similar Quantum HDs that were a different size but released at nearly the same time. After swapping logic boards, the old HD revived. I ghosted up the data and imaged it to a new Western Digital HD and all was restored. My research turned up that Quantum made prematurely dying HDs. Then I reinstalled the logic boards back to their original HDs and tested them out. For some reason, both Quantums worked. So, I formated the Quantums and Ebayed both to other buyers who wanted to revive their HDs. No biggie. It's very common. Hell, I never did this before and it worked for me, easy as pie.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll warn you for certain types of failing, but some things they just cannot detect. SMART is a good technology, but like everything it's just one tool among many that can help in a lot of situations, not all.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[gmack]

But SMART only warns you if something they can detect about to die. There are cases where the drive dies and there was no warning at all.

Or cases like the one just mentioned where the fault was with another componant and the damage extended to the drive.

SMART is cool but never depend on it.

Re:been there, done that.

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, so this is what happened to me during the Advanced Netware 2.15 days...

We had a 386-25 running Netware with a single 150Mb Micropolis SCSI hard drive, bought as a package with the HBA. This server lived in a closet of this sheet-metal fab firm, and it happened to share a electrical circuit with the AC unit on the roof.

According to the electrician, when the AC kicked in it pulled the voltage down on that branch, as we had about 120 amps running through a 100 amp service...

Needless to say, the server died one night, and when we power cycled it there were no SCSI drives to be found. Note, this is while my proposed purchase of an APC backup power supply and a tape backup system were still waiting "approval"...

When asked what I could do about the data, I said: "there's no grinding noises coming from the drive, so maybe we just burned up the logic board - let me order another kit like this one, and I'll see what I can do..."

Long story short, we swapped the logic boards and put in the new HBA, and lo! and behold! the darn server booted!

As a side effect, the serial number for the drive was on the _logic board_, not on the platter assembly. My assistant, not being aware of this, returned the "dead" drive and got a warranty replacement. Also, in two days I had a APC Smart UPS 1500 and a DAT backup drive installed with ARCServe making the backups.

That server lived on that circuit for another two years, and I could tell every time the AC compressor kicked in, as the UPS would kick into SmartBoost and the alarm would go off. 30 seconds later, after the dip ended, it would beep again to say the power was back to OK.

Re:The opposite

[Anonymous Coward]

bucket of sulphuric acid
or dip it in liquid nitrogen then smash the platter with a hammer

Re:What?

[v1]

Agreed, this is a bit silly to post as a "wow, this is just sooooo amazing!" idea. We got in a batch of those crappy little micro dells, the ones that don't even have a CD-ROM drive, and they all came with the same model of Western Digital Caviar (YAAACK!) drives. One by one almost 50% of them failed, onboard controller card just stopped working. Everytime I swapped a card out to salvage the data, I had people ooohing and ahhhing my efforts like it was magic or something. This is not rocket science, anyone reading this article should be capable of doing it themselves.

Tell me he replaced the platter head amp board inside the drive, ok, then I'll be a little impressed. Actually I'm still a bit surprised people can open up the drives and get away with it... more than once I've given people the advice to open the drive and gently spin the platters (by the edge please!) in cases where the motor was going out and wouldn't spin it up and they needed the data NOW. Sure it voids the warranty and probably will tear up the drive, but when the data is more important than the drive, it's a worthy one-shot. One fellow I told that to got his data off, and used a can of compressed air to blow out the drive thoroughly while replacing the lid, and to my knowledge, the drive is still working. (tho I sure wouldn't trust it)

Re:The opposite

[belroth]

Stick it in the oven (not the microwave) on the higest temp for three hours, should demagnetize the platters nicely.
If you want some fun, to complete the job, drop it in a bucket of cold water afterwards.

Out of curiosity I took failed drive apart to see what was inside, the platters make nice shiny toys, you could even use them as shuriken I suppose...

Re:Hardware discrepencies

[Anonymous Coward]

Yup, you can (easily) flash the firmware. I've flashed several Seagate disks (Barracuda IV) without any failures.
Of course, one of them died shortly afterwards because I didn't cool it well enough. :-)

I wrote this a while back -> http://www.acdev.org/sbiv_firmware/ [acdev.org]

Re:Drives in the freezer

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a guy at work who had been saving his work to the HD instead of to the servers where it would have been backed up. The day before he was to present the results of his project to the president of the company, the drive failed.

It would spin up, and apparantly work for a few minutes, then spin down.

Suspecting heat-related problem, I stuck it in the freezer for a few hours, tried it again, got it to run long enough for the PC to finish booting & to copy the data, then it failed again.

Like your people said though, I wouldn't necessarily try it on a drive where less dramatic measure might work.

Used to make a living doing this

[rabbar]

Many years ago I used to buy large quantities of dead harddrives from Gateway Computers. I took the logic boards off every one of them and using a known good logic board and a known good drive I'd quickly figure out which logic boards were good and which drives were good. Combine good with good and I'd usually end up with a nice pile of working drives which I resold on Usenet for a nice profit. The dead drives I would either RMA back to the manufacturer or sell as dead drives. That was back when a good drive was worth $1/MByte and I was buying dead ones for 10 cents/MByte. As a side note, all those dead drives used to be someone's good drive and naturally all their files and data were still on the drives.

Re:The opposite

[Anonymous Coward]

The official standard for top secret classified information says melt 'em. Of course, if you don't have a furnace of a few thousand degrees, that might not be feasible, in which case I would suggest microwaving them and then dousing them in a bucket of cold water (like a sibling post said) and then a blowtorch. Don't stop until your drive platters are the texture of pea soup :)

Of course, I'm professionally paranoid. Normal people use Autoclave [washington.edu], and I've heard it works well.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[troutsoup]

i found a freeware SMART monitor for windows

http://www.worldstart.com/weekly-download/archiv es /active-smart-monitor-1.11.htm

installed it and it seems to work fine.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[vrt3]

When one of my hard drives a while back was dying, Windows 2000 had put SMART warnings in the system log. Third-party monitor not required, apparently.

Not the same model

[MrResistor]

The first drive he bought had a different part number, as you can see by looking at the close-up pics he took of the labels.

Also, firmware can be changed. All it takes is a utility and a .bin file, just like flashing the BIOS on your motherboard (except you can usually do it in Windows). I would contact tech support first, though, and make sure the firmware you need is compatable with the different hardware. You'll probably have to contact them anyway to get the .bin.

Lastly, if you plan on trying this at home you need to know that Seagate and IBM/Hitachi (and, I presume, other vendors, but those are the only ones I deal with in a professional capacity) classify drives in catagories, like "generic 80GB 7200RPM ATA100" and there are often several part numbers that satisfy that description which the vendor considers interchangable for the purposes of warranty replacement (sometimes that isn't really true, which is the only reason I know this, but usually it is). Basically that just means that there's no real guarantee that you'll get the exact same drive. I've been able to get around that by making enough noise, but I also was acting as an agent of a $25billion company, so YMMV.

Re:Backing up is like voting

[Anonymous Coward]

Or just use this Link. [worldstart.com]

Re:Hardware discrepencies

[Walt Dismal]

Not only firmware differences. Some years ago I had a WD 1.6GB drive and the board went bad. I talked to WD and they said that simply swapping the board was not guaranteed to work. The reason is, for every drive, during manufacturing they tweak parameters on the board, sometimes by writing values into an EEPROM. This is done automatically by calibration equipment. Such values control head gain, servos, etc. If you merely swap boards, you run the risk of then getting marginal or erroneous performance. Even in modern drives there is still plenty of analog at the front end, and things like gain and servo tracking in the read channel are important. So this guy was lucky indeed because it was not 100% likely to work.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

It means they took a returned drive, and made sure it met factory specs, then resold it.