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Recover HD Using a Magnet

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Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet

#81

Post by mirimir »

pontifier wrote: post #16
mirimir wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

That's very cool. Maybe I'll try it, just for lulz.

> 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.

Right.

But thinking of EvanAnderson's anecdote, maybe a permanent magnet near a spinning platter is a changing magnetic field, from the perspective of the platter surface.

Still, with the platter inside a steel case, you'd need a very strong permanent magnet, held very close.

Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet

#83

Post by wizzwizz4 »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #77
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only a problem for XHTML. HTML5 implicitly closes the previous tag when you open the next one; thus, a inside a is an implicit , if you will.

Why does VS Code auto add the closing tag when you open them then? It doesn’t do it for, say, . Bug?

Feature.

tags can function as containers for text and other elements, and VS Code can't distinguish between

, with the special handling, and , without it.

Okay, to be fair, that does sound like a bug.

Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet

#84

Post by jaclaz »

hinkley wrote: post #34
netsharc wrote: post #19

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.

Only for the record until soome 15 years ago, exchanging boards was easy, later disk PCB's contrain some "adaptive" data into a (soldered) EPROM (or Flash/whatever, anyway a memory chip), so now you have to de-solder the chip from the old board and re-solfer it on the new one.

There are dedicated hardwares+softwares (as an example the "PC-3000") that are capable of re-programming the chip on the new board with data extracted from the chip on the old board or to re-program them anew, but they are very pricey and only data recovery companies can afford them and the connected training/resources.

So:

1) simple card swapping won't work on any disk manufactured since (roughly) 2005 (possibly even earlier)

2) card swapping can still be made BUT you need to "migrate" the chip from the old board, it is usually an 8-pin SMD so it is doable at home, but not exactly easy-peasy if you are not familiar and experienced in dde-soldering and soldering

Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet

#85

Post by throwaway3563 »

The strangest HDD failure I ever dealt with was a Toshiba notebook drive where the centre bearing had become shot. The notebook would not boot and the HDD sounded like a coffee grinder.

By moving the notebook in the air and trying different positions the noise changed. I was able to get the machine to eventually boot by holding the notebook in my hands at an angle and spinning myself on the spot. At the time I guess the gyroscopic forces were enough to get the bearing to sit right and the HDD to be able to spin properly. Doing so caused the drive to work long enough to get the most important files off it.

Definitely the strangest thing I’ve ever done to “fix” a piece of computing equipment.

Re: Recover HD Using a Magnet

#86

Post by thepete2 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #68
thepete2 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? He doesn't close the tags.

That's only a problem for XHTML. HTML5 implicitly closes the previous tag when you open the next one; thus, a inside a is an implicit , if you will.

Didn't know that. Thanks :)
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