HDD crash - hard lesson to swallow....
Don M
Posts: 1,653
I have an HP desktop with a 1TB Seagate drive that I installed a few years ago. Long story but here goes....
My laptop had contracted a virus so I took it to a local guy who works on computers. He found the virus, cleaned up the machine and installed a newer virus protection. I mentioned to him that my desktop machine which runs 24/7 sometimes takes a long time to boot up if you happen to shut it down or do a reboot from installing updates etc. He mentioned that it too may have a virus or trojan since both computers share the network blah blah blah....
So I took my machine to him. Several days and excuses go by and it's not done yet. Says there were a lot of trojans on the machine. So finally after a week without I told him I at least needed the data off the hard drive onto a portable drive. He said ok. So I go over to his place with the portable drive and he was going to show me what he had done so far. Well the machine wouldn't boot up. Acted very strange. He says "don't worry your data is safe and he'll get it off." Fast forward 4 more days. Doesn't return calls. Won't answer the phone. So I am figuring he is in over his head and we have trouble. I finally get a hold of him today and told him that I just want it all back. He of course agrees. All he could say was "Sorry". I wanted to wring his neck!
So now I take the hard drive to a computer store in town and ask if they could retrieve the data. They hook up the drive and all it does is go "click, click, click... click" then spins down. Computer won't recognize it. He says there is a fault with the drive most likely mechanical.
So now what? Data recovery service is very expensive (quoted $1200 - $1800 from Seagate) and there are no guarantees that they will get anything back.
So lesson learned the hard way- Yes I should have backed up the data prior to taking it over but I also blame him for not doing so as well. How he let it go from a working unit to junk torks me off. He tried various software and even putting in freezer to try and revive it.
I have been reading online about swapping the disk platter(s) to a working drive of the exact model. I know all the precautions about cleanliness etc. but wondered if anyone has ever tried that?
Or any other solution?
All those pictures etc that I don't have any other copies of....
My laptop had contracted a virus so I took it to a local guy who works on computers. He found the virus, cleaned up the machine and installed a newer virus protection. I mentioned to him that my desktop machine which runs 24/7 sometimes takes a long time to boot up if you happen to shut it down or do a reboot from installing updates etc. He mentioned that it too may have a virus or trojan since both computers share the network blah blah blah....
So I took my machine to him. Several days and excuses go by and it's not done yet. Says there were a lot of trojans on the machine. So finally after a week without I told him I at least needed the data off the hard drive onto a portable drive. He said ok. So I go over to his place with the portable drive and he was going to show me what he had done so far. Well the machine wouldn't boot up. Acted very strange. He says "don't worry your data is safe and he'll get it off." Fast forward 4 more days. Doesn't return calls. Won't answer the phone. So I am figuring he is in over his head and we have trouble. I finally get a hold of him today and told him that I just want it all back. He of course agrees. All he could say was "Sorry". I wanted to wring his neck!
So now I take the hard drive to a computer store in town and ask if they could retrieve the data. They hook up the drive and all it does is go "click, click, click... click" then spins down. Computer won't recognize it. He says there is a fault with the drive most likely mechanical.
So now what? Data recovery service is very expensive (quoted $1200 - $1800 from Seagate) and there are no guarantees that they will get anything back.
So lesson learned the hard way- Yes I should have backed up the data prior to taking it over but I also blame him for not doing so as well. How he let it go from a working unit to junk torks me off. He tried various software and even putting in freezer to try and revive it.
I have been reading online about swapping the disk platter(s) to a working drive of the exact model. I know all the precautions about cleanliness etc. but wondered if anyone has ever tried that?
Or any other solution?
All those pictures etc that I don't have any other copies of....
Comments
keep trying I have always retrieved data off a hard disk one way or another.
http://www.hdd-parts.com/
Good luck on getting your data back!
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2006/01/freeze-your-hard-drive-to-recover-data.html
...Careful about freezer ... condensation can be a killer also.
Sorry for your loss, but I would follow the direction of a different circuit board.
Also if you are a smoker Hard drives wont last as long in that environment.
-Phil
After that I usually run HDD regenerator - a lovely tool ! This alone has recovered some 'seemingly destroyed' drives.. Where others have failed.
It may be worth a look http://www.dposoft.net/
I feel your pain !
Rgds.
John Twomey
When you go to this website one of the first things that shows is a repair kit for the exact drive that I have. The 7200.11 Seagate. There must be an issue with them. I can only hope that it may be the PC board.
A) OSX has time machine . itsd DD with a GUI . works wonders !
C) rotate your backups . BK 1 one month BK 2 the next
THis way of you bork a backup with a bad main HDD you still have a clean ( we hope ) but older copy )
I HAVE had failures Induced by the backup !!! . it can really stress a drive when you are seaking for 4 Hours.
D) never ever ever open a drive . (a house is not a clean room) .
for me its the MTBF on theberings not the heads that is a issue . my computer has been off less then 20 days out of the time I have got it in 09 .
HDDs are cheap 75USD for a 1TB is a ton less then drive savers
My only down fall is its al in my house so a fire / flood ect is my only issue
if in doubt use a new drive.
Been there a couple times myself, so I know the pain you are feeling. The circuit board swap sounds cool, I wish I would have tried that in the past, but instead I tried the platter swap and eventually gave up and cried
Bruce
I know it is too late, but in Real Estate there are 3 factors: Location, Location, Location. In computer the same applies but replace location with Backup, Backup, Backup. Redundancy works best!!!! Good luck.
I've done a lot of things to cure this, some of which I'm not putting here. Before you do any of these things, get setup so that if the drive does spin up, you can get data from it. You might get one shot.
1. Dry ice the drive. Put it inside something, and the dry ice can cool it fairly quick. There is a chance of condensation, but not too big of one. Depends on where you live. Try a dry room, use the heater to blast it nice and warm, closing everything, if you must. I have removed the controller board before doing this. The chance of short is less when working with a cold drive and warm circuit board for what that's worth.
2. Good power supply. Get an external case, and use thick connecting cables, and make sure the case power is right on the higher side of the specs. Internal power supplies, and laptop type enclosures are not always solid in this way. My favorite is to re-purpose an old IDE CD-ROM, or SCSI enclosure. I've got one I use for this stuff.
Those drive docks are pretty nice. At work, we have one that is self-powered, with a USB connection. I strongly recommend getting hold of one of those. It's particularly nice for the freeze cycle, because you can just pop in the drive to a computer that's ready, and if it goes, the drive gets mounted. Recommended. We've recovered several laptop drives that just won't spin up from the internal power, but do just fine in the drive dock.
3. Combine the first two with some rapid twist motions just ahead of the click. Rotate the drive quickly estimating the axis of rotation to be the center of the platter.
4. Heat, then cold cycle it. Hair dryer, then dry ice, then dock or enclosure.
After those quick tricks, it starts to get dicey.
So that's the case for spindles are stuck. There is one other case, and that's the drive media is damaged. Sometimes, waiting it out for a long time will work. Had one disk do this, and it would take about 10 minutes to mount. Once it did, accessing specific directories would cause another long delay... Mount that on a system that won't just scan the directory structure, and command line your way right to your data, avoiding file managers. If the damage isn't where your data is, this will work very nicely.
Then there is dd_rescue if the drive actually mounts. That thing can image the drive, taking the good stuff, then layering back over the bad stuff until there just is no more. What I do is run dd_rescue multiple times to capture all the data I can, and sometimes this takes a day or two when it hits the bad zone, retrying a lot. Then I mount that drive image into a virtual machine so I can examine it. I copy it first too. If the image is mountable, command line to the data. If it's not, you can attempt to use the OS tools to get it mountable then go look for your data.
Going beyond here requires specialized software and hardware, and or potentially getting down and dirty with the file system. The recovery guys are going to be cheaper than your time is.
I used the Parallax PropPlug to connect to the drive and using Putty am able to communicate with the drive but when I tell it to "spin up" I get this error:
F3 2>U
Error 1009 DETSEC 00006008
Spin Error
Elapsed Time 14.915 secs
R/W Status 2 R/W Error 84150180
Looking further into this it sounds as if it is either a bad head or a mechanical problem with the motor / platter where it reads it's setup info.
Those in the know do not recommend swapping the PC board evidently there is some sort of "marriage" between the board and some data that has been stored on the discs and in the flash memory on the board. I guess that used to work for older drives but not these newer ones.
Right now I have it in the freezer and will try one more time to get her up and running....
The thing is if your data is critical and you need it back, send it to datarecovery.com because they will look at it for free and quote you and they're very fast.
If you freeze the drive it will condensate when it warms up, so only do that if you cannot afford to have it repaired correctly, it's a complete last resort.
Also, things like swapping the drive controller out do not usually work on HDDs larger than 500GB in capacity due to come calibration something or other I have read about in the past.
Here you can see what looks to me as scratch lines on the platter. There is another one on the outside perimeter. Not sure if those 2 small "whiskers" are right or not.
Also you can see on the hub that the platters are mounted to have gall marks from rubbing on the cover.
Here's the marks on the cover.
Looks like my only option at this point is to send it off.
These days my backup strategy is to copy between drives on different machines, and keep the more important stuff on a USB key too.
Frankly, I've taken an old disk cover off to watch it operate until it died. It took a really long time in an office setting. We were kind of stunned, and it was going to be a suggestion, based on data quantity. I had it sorting some files in a big directory and copying stuff. The thing did it nicely, slowly building up errors over time, until it got just crappy. Had it on the desk, connected to my laptop with USB cable. Those things are spooky fast! It was worth it just to watch the mechanical parts move and hear the sounds. Could have very easily done a quick copy off the thing.
Instead, we gave it one big file to copy over and the sorting was a short PYTHON program, both tasks intended to let us see some movement and hear some sounds.
The platters in that one appeared to be some glass or silicon substrate coated with magnetic media. They were surprisingly strong too. Once the drive died off, we took it all apart to play with the platters.
Those scratch marks look bad. On the one we sacrificed for the quest of learning, the platters were flawless! I've honestly never experienced a surface finish that good. Still have one individual platter on the desk to admire from time to time.
Decades ago, I used them for recovering accounting systems on failed hard disks and they made the whole problem go away in a very professional manner.
Sometimes you just need to find the right small business that depends on satisfied customers.
http://www.driveservice.com/
plus you took the cover off. and it was frozen? plus it looked like it was banged on.
it's toast.
Not blaming you, but next time you send your computer in for repair, you'll have to say "there's important stuff not backed up" on this or that drive or whatever. Otherwise, what repair person wants to sit there for hours (probably for free) as gigs upon gigs of files are copied?
Yep, off to the dump or preferably recycler I'm afraid.