[SWLUG] ot: hard disk recovery

[Christopher Mitchell]

> 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
>   

As I said, changing the board does work in a lot of cases, but when it 
is your own money it would be pointless getting an exact model 
replacement only to find out that the platters/heads are damaged. 
However the first step as mentioned earlier is to use MHDD to see if you 
can get the drive to acquire and read from it. As this is a linux/techie 
discussion board I assume people have a higher than normal understanding 
of electronics/computers.