So, I’m about to open up a hard drive, at home :eek:
No particular point to this thread, I’m not asking a question, just wondered if anyone wanted to comment or had any experience…
The drive died, I think the motor has gone, and though there is important data on it, it’s not worth the £300 or so to send to a data lab.
The plan is simply to open the drive and see if I can “free up” the motor somehow (the disk spins, but doesn’t “spin up”). I couldn’t find an identical drive, but I’ve got a very similar one that I’m hoping to transplant the motor from if needbe (both are single-platter drives).
Conventional wisdom has it that platters cannot be exposed to unfiltered air. But hackers wisdom has it that, fuck it, I only need it to work for a couple minutes to get what I need.
I would really, REALLY advise against this, at least wait to do it as a “last ditch measure.”
Are you sure it’s the motor and not the control board? If you don’t have an identical drive, try searching online for an identical one and then just swap the boards on them. I had a dead hard drive and this got it to work (and they weren’t even perfectly identical…different lot numbers, but same model, and it worked fine.)
And in the situations where it doesn’t work it can REALLY complicate things.
All attempts to recover data from a drive can cause additional damage. The degree of risk you’re willing to take should be directly correlated to the importance of the data on the drive. In the OP’s case I’d say have at it! Sounds like a fun experiment.
The “funny” thing is, I do have backups of some of the data. But it’s only at the point of drive failure where I realized what was really important. Like, oh, that programming project I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks…
Yep tried it.
I only tried the 15 minute option however.
(There are sites that say “You must do this overnight if it’s to have any chance of working” and sites that say “If you do this for more than 15 minutes, the drive’s definitely finished”)
A quick check: if you put your ear to the drive, what do you hear?
If the controller board has gone, you need the exact same controller board.
Do not open up the drive unless you have access to a clean-room environment. Yes, it may well work, but if it doesn’t, you’ve screwed yourself.
If the data is that important, stump up the money for a data-recovery place.
If you freeze the drive, make sure you put in plenty of silica gel bags to absorb moisture, and you’ll need more when you take it out to absorb any condensation. And double-bag the drive before you put it in the freezer.
The idea of heating the drive has two sources: firstly there is the idea of making use of the different coefficients of expansion of the components in the drive - freezing the drive makes us of this too; secondly a long while ago, one drive manufacturer accidentally used an oil with too high a sticky point and you put the drive on the radiator to warm it through so that the oil would become sufficiently fluid.
But if the motor has gone, neither heating nor warming will work. Nor will changing the controller board.
I froze a hard drive so that I could read data off of it. I think I left it in the freezer for 2-3 hours before I took it out and connected it to the PC. One problem was the condensation that started to collect on the drive when I removed it from the freezer and connected it to the PC (not internally, of course). Perhaps putting the drive in an enclosure and putting the entire enclosure in the freezer would limit the condensation to the outside of the enclosure?
On the upside, I found someone selling the same model number as my drive for £10, so I’ve ordered that and I’ll try the controller board option first (I don’t know if it’s from the same month and factory as my drive, just gonna chance it).
The bad news (aside from the lack of closure), is that I’ve now discovered that my drive is actually 2 platters. So I’m pretty sure that swapping the motor is virtually impossible (apparently if there’s even a micron’s movement between the two platters, the data’s doomed).
If you’ve never seen the internals of a hard drive before, think of a miniaturized record player, the record(s) are the platters, and the “tonearm” is the read/write head assembly, it may look like the R/W heads are touching the platter, but they actually float ONE MICRON above the surface of the platter, less than the width of a human hair
one of my old co-workers had an amusing, but not too accurate analogy of the head tolerances found in a modern hard drive…
“Imagine an F-16 fighter flying 1 foot off the ground at Mach 2, a single speck of dust would be the equivalent of a five-story building”
so, no, there’s no way for the home user to safely open a hard drive and “swap the motor” on it, not unless that home user happens to have a fully-staffed clean-room as part of their home, besides there are two “motors” inside a hard drive anyway, the platter motor, that spins the hard drive platters, and the head motor, a voice-coil “motor” that moves the R/W head arm over the platter
try the controller board swap first, if not, send it to a data recovery company, if the data is “mission critical”
It’s not like you can just pop off the lid and find a motor connected by gears or a belt to the platters. They’re direct-drive, and the platters are pretty firmly attached to the motor. Also, the heads are parked somewhere on the platter, probably at the innermost point - they don’t retract off the platters. So, you’d need a strategy to get the heads off the platters without chipping the heads, and then to spread each pair (one on each side of each platter) to get them back onto the platters.
In case you hadn’t guessed - this isn’t something that can be done at the kitchen table.
You’re probably thinking of stepper motor drives. Most drives now use a voice coil actuator that retracts the heads automatically when not in use.
As to the OP, data recovery is normally done in a clean room environment. The heads sort of float over the disk surface and the clearance is measured in thousandths of an inch - if that. So even the tiniest bit of dust can cause a head crash.
It’s pretty rare for a drive motor to fail. Virtually every hard disk that has failed on me has been the result of the integrated electronics going bad. Since you’re saying that the drive spins, that means it is also spinning up unless you hear something else going on that would indicate otherwise.
Unfortunately, that probably still means a trip to a data recovery company. On older IDE drives I’ve transplanted the circuit boards from another drive with the same microcode revision level and brought it back to life. You might still be able to pull that trick depending on the brand and type of drive but you will have to find the right board to switch out. There are vendors that specialize in such things and tech support for your drive might be able to point you in the right direction.
The whole clean room thing… the way it was told to me, hard drives aren’t air-tight, they have a “breathing” hole. It is anticipated that occasional dust particles may land on a platter, but immediately be spun off. Taking the case off is another matter of course, but it only needs to live for a few minutes.
If I put my ear near to the drive I can hear “revving” as the disks attempt to spin. I can also feel some vibration correlated with that, which makes me think the disks are not seized.
However, it’s nothing like the high-pitched whirr of a drive “spinning up”, and certainly it never gets to the stage of hearing the clicks of the head jumping about.
If you hear clicking, that’s a bad sound; if you hear revving and feel vibration, that’s usually a good sound and usually means that the disks are spinning. So replacing the controller board should do the trick.
I meant the normal clicking you might hear as a drive powers up (as in this cool vid).
But point taken, I know what you mean. Fingers crossed that the new board works
I lost a hard drive recently that had a lot of DVRed TV shows on it. When I found out how much it was going to cost to recover, I decided that I’d just wait until the DVDs came out.
it may work, but there’s a good chance you’ll still have some unrecoverable data. Hard disk platters aren’t perfect when manufactured, and have some unusable areas on the disk from the get go. These “bad sectors” are mapped out and stored by the drive firmware as unusable, and each drive is different.
for 10 quid it’s still well worth trying, but don’t be surprised if at least a little of your data is corrupted.