[SWLUG] ot: hard disk recovery

[Daniel Morris]

On Fri, Jun 29, 2007 at 08:49:59PM +0100, bascule wrote:
> On Friday 29 June 2007 20:35:26 Christopher Mitchell wrote:
> > Go to a room with very little dust,
> > ie no fans, tiled floor if possible etc etc and open up the drive. If
> > there is platter damage then you are scuppered so save your cash and
> > write it off, and if the heads are mangled then it's either send off for
> > a head swap (we charge £400+ for this) or write it off.
> assuming i can find a room with little dust - none in my house - would
> platter damage be certain to show? 

I should qualify my remarks that I know very little about hard drives
other than having pulled them apart for curiosity (& gone "Ooooooh,
shiney"), but I think you need to approach any investigation as a one
way process - ie you are going to end up with multiple (maybe broken)
pieces at the end that you may not be able to put back together!

Tinkering with the electronics is likely to be easier/less destructive
than getting in to the platters. Can you swap a controller board from 
a similar disk? I've heard that this sometimes works. Can you identify a
burnt out component? My brother-in-law has just recovered lots of
critical data, including his CV, by desoldering a defunct diode - which
was probably part of the over voltage protection circuitry. The disk
started fine after that and he immediately copied all the data off it.
This could have been a one-off, so it was important to have the system
ready to grab the data before trying to spin the disk up. I'd suggest
that you don't assume it will start twice or even read twice.

 Daniel