If you Google for the word "sticktion" or "stiction" you'll find other remedies. Like putting it in a ziplock bag and freezing it, or (youch) purposefully dropping it.
All approaches to release a head that's stuck to a platter.
Recover HD Using a Magnet
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does sound that way but, boy, it was eerily timed if it was.
Magnetic field falls off with inverse cube of distance once you're past the approximate size of the magnet. Not to mention that the drive itself is in a ferrous enclosure that provides a lot of shielding... the magnetic field you applied at 6 inches is approximately nothing.
I will definitely concede that I may have the 6" measurement wrong. Heck-- I may have actually put my hand right on the PC.
I stack running hard disk drives, all of which have large neodymium magnets inside them, in close proximity all the time with no ill effects. It makes no sense.
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#13Don't use dd -- use ddrescue (reads all "working" sectors before retrying broken ones).
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#14My anecdote:
Around 1993 I had a Commodore Amiga with an A590 external hard drive. A big enclosure that could be connected to the expansion port on the left of an Amiga 500, containing a very precious 20MB hard disk.
One day, it stopped working. I tried everything but I couldn’t get it to work. A friend offered to take a look at it so I put it in my backpack and took the train to my friend. When connected to his A500, the drive worked lime a charm.
When I drove back home in the train I wondered what would be the matter with my A500 since it apparently made my A590 hard drive fail.
However, once I got home and reconnected the drive, it worked. No problem whatsoever.
Until two days later. It failed. You know what’s going to happen, right? Took it to my friend, it worked, took it back and it worked for two more days.
Turns out that disconnecting it, putting it in my bag, walking it around for a while worked just as well.
Turns out that disconnecting it, dropping it from 5cm / 2 inches and reconnecting it, worked just as well.
Which was what I did for the next four years or so. Whenever it stopped working, I disconnected it, dropped it and reconnected it.
Always loved the look on the face of people who witnessed me starting up my Amiga.
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#15Don't use dd -- use ddrescue (reads all "working" sectors before retrying broken ones).
Does this mean it puts less strain on a potentially broken disk in an attempt to maximize how much can be rescued before it fails?
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#16How did the data not get destroyed by the magnet?
It's changing magnetic fields that wipe HDDs. Such as powerful electromagnets. In a clean (enough) room, they could have opened the drive, and just poked the actuator arm. Decades ago, I had a HDD that wouldn't spin up unless I nudged the platter with a pencil erasor. Very near the center, of course. There was a hole in the case, in just the right place, with Al tape over it.
Doesn't even have to be a very clean room... I played around with an old 1 gig drive years ago. My friends and I opened up the case so we could watch the drive doing it's thing. We did a fresh os install and watched as it formatted the disk and copied files. The head was remarkably strong, and would move so fast it looked like it was in 2 places at once while copying files. It was fun to stick a screwdriver between the 2 ghostly write arms, and have the screwdriver almost knocked from your hand, while the drive went on like nothing had happened. It ran for weeks before it died.
I've also stuck a 3 1/4" floppy disk to a huge 2"x2"x5" neodimium magnet with no ill effects. The drive was able to read it fine afterwards with the same md5 hash of the contents.
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#17Don't use dd -- use ddrescue (reads all "working" sectors before retrying broken ones).
Does this mean it puts less strain on a potentially broken disk in an attempt to maximize how much can be rescued before it fails?
yep; it's quite clever about how it deals with broken sectors too; starts jumping over them in increasingly large amounts, and goes back later (in multi-pass) to get the missing bits.
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#18My anecdote: Around 1993 I had a Commodore Amiga with an A590 external hard drive. A big enclosure that could be connected to the expansion port on the left of an Amiga 500, containing a very precious 20MB hard disk. One day, it stopped working. I tried everything but I couldn’t get it to work. A friend offered to take a look at it so I put it in my backpack and took the train to my friend. When connected to his A500…
"sticktion" was an issue with some early Mac drives.
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#19My anecdote: Around 1993 I had a Commodore Amiga with an A590 external hard drive. A big enclosure that could be connected to the expansion port on the left of an Amiga 500, containing a very precious 20MB hard disk. One day, it stopped working. I tried everything but I couldn’t get it to work. A friend offered to take a look at it so I put it in my backpack and took the train to my friend. When connected to his A500…
Might as well share mine: one day the magic smoke[0] left a lot of components on my PC, including the HD with no backups. I saw the board was replacable, so that's what I did: bought an identical disk on eBay, some torx screwdrivers, transplated the good board to the dead disk, and it worked perfectly fine.
Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet
#20I've fixed this problem a few times (on different drives) by giving the drive a not so gentle thwack with a hammer. The trick is to hit it on the long side, which tends to dislodge the stuck heads/arm. If you hit it on the top or bottom, you're likely to break something, and hits on the short side aren't likely to achieve anything at all.