Reviving A Dead Hard Drive The Hard Way 415
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!
Hardware discrepencies (Score:5, Interesting)
The firmware is not the same when numbers match (Score:2, Interesting)
been there, done that. (Score:4, Interesting)
I even replaced platters on 10 gig drives..
More dead drives (Score:2, Interesting)
As far as the article goes: What a waste! It must be damn nice to be able to buy TWO new drives to replace the logic board on one! Sure, one of the new drives is usable, but the other is shot.
Porn and never winternights (Score:5, Interesting)
But it totally kills the warantee..;)
But my 60 gig recently bit the dust, and the first thing people told me to do was stick it in the freezer... (just like he did in the article) Of course I naturall say "But that'll kill it."
theirs? "It's dead already, idiot"
Obviously... (Score:5, Interesting)
He seems somewhat surprised that the price of repairing a hard drive is more than buying a couple of new ones. You are paying to get the data salvaged, not the physical disk back.
Having worked in technical support with a database company, I can tell you how upset people can get when you tell them it's going to cost almost $400/hr to salvage their database. Sometimes it could take upwards of 16 hrs to do it depending on the size and extent of the damage.
How far a little proactiveness and an occasional backup of important data will go.
Replacing logic boards is obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
I've also had good luck pulling data off 2.5" drives by pulling the covers and simply running them through a hardware cloning box (about $120 now). The fact that you're reducing their MTBF to something like 10 hours is irrelevant if you get the job done in 20 minutes.
Oh, act lawyerish: only charge for successful recoveries. That way, the clients even sympathise with you if you don't succeed.
The opposite (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually...character editor would've worked. (Score:2, Interesting)
Data insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hard drives have warranties. Sure, these warrenty periods are shortening, but that's neither here nor there. Given that a drive is going to fail eventually, would it be beneficial for drive makers to offer 'data insurance'? Data recovery is expensive because it's not a common practice. If you paid some reasonable, optional $x when you buy a drive, and the drive goes down, and you could send it back to the maker for recovery (having paid 'insurance' on it), the practice would be more common and the price would decrease. The idea being, like most forms of insurance, you are paying less than what the recovery would cost because the rest is subsidized by the other people who pay but never need it. A third party recovery service could offer this as well.
There are a number of issues I can see with this arrangement (privacy, confidentiality of data, what happens when the drive can't be recovered, what if they just SAY it can't be done, etc), but it's something to think about.
The hard way? (Score:5, Interesting)
"The hard way" would have been buying a new drive, taking it to a cleanroom and transplanting the platters! You'd more than likely lose the use of the 'donor' drive, and there's a higher chance of failure in this much more invasive procedure, but that would be much more article-worthy.
Re:Hardware discrepencies (Score:2, Interesting)
he didn't damage the hard drive. the board failed on him, and he fixed the problem by replacing the board.
from the article, "Now, I wonder if I can make use of the warranty on the original drive........."
in view of how he successfully repaired the drive and that he said that at the end of the article, i think he meant that remark in humour and wasn't actually planning on abusing the warranty.
Once Upon A Time...Any IDeas? (Score:3, Interesting)
Being pissed as I was, I opened up the damn thing and got ready to wreak havoc on the platters.
But I chickened out, (what kinda chemicals might that thing spew out?) and put the drive back together.
To my surprise, the drive worked again!
My room is was a nasty, dusty place too...so I bought a new drive, mirrored the old, and never used the fixed drive again.
I still have it in my house...an old Quantum 6 Gig drive.
Any ideas what was wrong, and how opening the sealed platter compartment might fix anything?
Re:been there, done that. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:All I can say is (Score:1, Interesting)
The sad part is, I still like the drives (I run 4 different ones between work and home) but I think I'll have to go back to Seagate, or maybe turn over to Maxtor, (just not IBM!) for new installs.
Did this with Maxtor drives about a year ago. (Score:3, Interesting)
Since I had 4 identical Maxtor 80 GB, I waited until Maxtor sent me a replacement, swapped the logic boards, brought the drive up immediately, and dumped everything over. I sent the drive with the bad logic board back and resumed work.
I doubt I would have gone to the trouble of asking vendors to look up their firmware versions had I not bought several identical drives!
IBM DeathStar (Score:3, Interesting)
This trick can work on some IBM hard drives. IBM had a problem where you would hear a clicking sound. The reason for the clicking was sometimes that the disk had increased in size due to the heat, and the heads were unable to compensate. Putting the drive in the freezer made the disk shrink getting the heads correctly aligned again.
Obviously, the drive did the same thing after 10 min, but atleast you got the most important data off the drive.
Data recovery prices (Score:3, Interesting)
Um, he did buy two replacement drives in the process of fixing the dead one. (He said he was going to try to return one of them.) The DIY approach was probably a lot faster, though.
I've done this on several occasions (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not generally something you want to do as you could end up with two dead drives instead of one. But in certain situations it is the only way to recover a system that HAS to be up and running and contains critical data that may not have been backed up recently.
Re:Lame (Score:3, Interesting)
My attempt was actually more of a clean bench than a clean room... it was a plastic-enclosed work area kept positively pressurized with filtered air. I think it did a good job preventing contamination, but I just didn't have the elbow room to work on the drives properly. Lost a few days worth of source code, but it could have been worse.
It happens everywhere. (Score:4, Interesting)
Even more impressive (Score:2, Interesting)