51–60 of 86 posts
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/freezing-a-hard-drive/
If you can, leave the hard drive in the freezer while you access it. Only works for old spinny hard drives of course.
How did the data not get destroyed by the magnet?
the whole magnet and hard drives thing is a really old hoax. with normal household magnets or even strong neodym magnets nothing will happen to your data but if you have a really strong industrial electro magnet at hand you can wipe a drive with it... here is an old national geographics video on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8LWTe5CqQg
This a fantastic webpage.
My 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…
FWIW the failure mode (which was also common in drives for the SPARCStation at the time) was called "stiction." That occurred when the drive parked the heads, after power down, into the landing zone on the platter. At Sun we took apart a number of failed drives (which could also be recovered sometimes by giving them a sharp twist) and hunted for the root cause. The answer was that over some time the drive heads becam…
I have fixed a ton of drives, in general. Board replacements, swapping platters, head swaps, etc. Some takeaways: I started doing this under tupperware, and that worked. I built a "cleanroom" out of a new sandblasting cabinet, and that worked better. Later i built a laminar flow bench out of a cheap kobalt tool-box and some plexiglass, and that was better still. Swapping the control boards works on some makes (wd), m…
- a MyBook that isn't recognized anymore?
I've figured out there's probably some encryption in the casing because when I disassemble it and connect it directly it shows up as unformatted or something.
- an ssd which seems even more dead.
Personally I've gotten back erased data (photorec) and data from at least 2 other disks (tilting the disk or freezing the disk), but these two have me stumped which is sad since they broke shortly after each other and one were supposed to be the backup ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic-smoke.html
I've heard tell that some data recovery companies have a stable of the controller cards from popular drive models. If swapping the card works, you get your data cheap. Beyond that it gets spendy.
Control electronics can be replaced. Bearings can be overcome with a higher motor drive current.
Some drives have crypto keys stored in flash - those are harder to fix.
I have fixed a ton of drives, in general. Board replacements, swapping platters, head swaps, etc. Some takeaways: I started doing this under tupperware, and that worked. I built a "cleanroom" out of a new sandblasting cabinet, and that worked better. Later i built a laminar flow bench out of a cheap kobalt tool-box and some plexiglass, and that was better still. Swapping the control boards works on some makes (wd), m…
Do you (or anyone else) have ideas for what to do with - a MyBook that isn't recognized anymore? I've figured out there's probably some encryption in the casing because when I disassemble it and connect it directly it shows up as unformatted or something. - an ssd which seems even more dead. Personally I've gotten back erased data (photorec) and data from at least 2 other disks (tilting the disk or freezing the disk)…
instead of magnet, what i used to do with ticking / corrupted drives was write full of 0, then write full of 1, then full of 0, repeat a few times. it takes frigging agents, but it kind of gets out all of the bumps in the magnetic material and smoothens it out again. fixed many broken drives doing that. ticking is often the read head getting dumped too much due to magnetic substance on the disk being piled up too muc…
Writing all 1's or 0's to the drive causes those sectors to either be rewritten or reallocated.
The fact it's 1's and 0's wouldn't have an impact anyway - all drives use data whitening techniques anyway.