I had backed up a lot of stuff to an external usb Hard Disk Drive. It conked out one day.
I saw there was some common fault with the arm not returning or something so I opened it up to have a look. It didn't help. Would it be possible to disassemble the unit a bit more, transfer the disk itself to another chassis and hope to read the disk?
Obv I am too mean to send it off for repair.
TW
If you have exposed the platter(s) to air, you've already trashed it. The heads fly at a height measured in single digit nanometers. A fingerprint or smoke particle, never mind the far bigger dust which will have settled on it will be enough to wreck it. Hitting any contamination will score the magnetic coating.
Discs can only be opened up safely in a clean room.
Did you open the USB case, and found a sealed HDD unit in it? Putting the sealed HDD unit in another caddy might work, to see if it's the caddy that's gone -- so: worth a try.
Or the HDD itself? Removing the platters/discs from one HDD and swapping to another is not going to work.
Thomas Prufer
Once you've taken the lid off the mechanism the drive is toast - dust has got in and will disturb the heads, which fly about 5 nanometres above the surface.
Even if you had a clean room, the drives are commissioned based on the way the heads and platters are screwed in: in the factory they spin up the disc and write the servo information using that specific position of the heads to the platters. If the platters are installed slightly off-centre, the tracks will be off-centre to compensate.
You need to get this right to nanometre precision. Unless you are in possession of a magnetic force microscope that can read the data and micro-align the platters into a new chassis, plus transplant the calibration data stored on the old PCB, it's not happening.
HDD are perhaps the most intricate micro-mechanical system that humanity has made, and that you can buy them for a few quid is astonishing.
Theo
I did this:
He doesn't say 'do this and you will instantly trash your disk', so one of you is wrong.
TW
In a word, no, its probably buggered and if you let muck in by taking it apart it would not help. Most of these are mapped by software and take into account the individual drive its mounted on, so the chances are it will be misaligned unless its very old big drive. Have you thought of cloud storage, although it costs money with a fast internet its like having an off site back up. Brian
Its all down to probabilities basically. At any rate you must expect some corruption and sometimes disc makers do have tools that run low level to remap the existing data onto another similar one. How successful that is depends on the fault. Brian
Once upon a time I took the lid off an 80MB HDD. It continued booting Windows 3.1 for two weeks, until it collected enough dust that it died.
Obviously things have moved on a long way since then. Data has got a lot lot smaller (now 20TB per drive not 80MB, a factor of 250,000).
So any tricks like this (also putting it in the freezer) are just the last recourse of the desperate. If the drive is borked and you can't afford to pay for recovery, what do you have to lose?
So you take the gamble. Who knows what the odds are in your particular case, there are too many variables. Worse than my 80MB drive is all I can say.
But once you've lost the bet there's nothing more to be done.
Theo
If the data is important then put the cover back on and send the drive to a data recovery company. Tell them what you've done and don't make things worse than they already are by doing any more fiddling. This problem isn't suitable for a DIY approach.
Yes, in theory.... how brave are you feeling:
Before delving in and mechanically dismantling anything, I would get a S/H drive of the same model, and transfer all the electronics and circuit boards onto yours.
Absolutely, that's what Odie Ferrous used to do, would often see pleas from him for specific circuit boards. Sadly I don't think he is still with us.
You've likely put the nails in its coffin by opening it and trying to move the heads.
NSA, Fort Meade, Maryland, and a note that there are intimate jpg's on it. Course, you will never get it back. Old HDs have good magnets on them.
Nope.
No one repairs them anyway unless its something very basic like a cracked trace etc.
Did it spin up before you opened it ?
+1. The only successful data recovery I ever did was on an old HDD drive that simply wouldn't do anything, where I swapped the driver board with an identical unit. We got the data off and scrapped the drive
The tolerances are probably far too tight these days, but in the past, spraying a mist of water to take the dust out of the air; opening the case; and freeing up the mechanism would sometimes give a few hours of operation to retrive data.
John Rumm snipped-for-privacy@nowhere.null wrote in news:uqd7jd$1hpan$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:
Loved it! Huge emphasis on the laminar flow bench then transferred the drive to it from a filthy workbench with previously used gloves covered in particles. No attempt to blow dust off the drive outer before opening. Particle dropped onto the top platter in short order later blown off with canned air. Hmmmn, think they got lucky and reminded myself to have multiple backups in the hope of avoiding a situation like this.
One thing to note today, when you swap controller boards, you now have to swap the EEPROM on the board. There are several EEPROMS, and one of them presumably contains the FDE keys. And that has to be transferred, so the drive can read the data to your satisfaction.
It's true, that for older drives, the swap is not required, because the drive is less sophisticated. And the word "encryption" had not been invented yet.
There was a press release years ago, promising that all drives of a certain date, would be FDE-equipped. Then... nothing happened. But the EEPROM issue, is a side effect of "the things we don't know". Just because they didn't have a launch party for their new toy, does not mean it is not at work in there.
If a controller board swap does not work for you, that could be the reason.
Paul
Back in the 100Mb HDD days - I've opened up drives, and resealed them, without a problem. I've had drives which failed to spin up from cold, due to striction, spinning the whole drive can get them to start. I have also successfully swapped PCB's from one drive to another. Swapping disk platters is simply never going to work.
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