Totally off topic thread here, you are warned.

So one day, there I was building my brand new box with lots of shiny peripherals when I thought "hey, what about quickly transferring all of my backed up work to the new drive".....5 seconds later, a quick trip over some CD's that I store on the floor and the drive dropped all of about 3 feet to the floor.

You know what happened next, I plug it in and the motor on the drive refuses to spin up, its well and truly retrieved its last piece of data for me.

So, does anyone here have any good advice or experience to share about possibly sending drives to a 'recovery service', I've got to get the data off the drive *somehow* and I'm trying to choose the least expensive option.

Regards and thanks in advance;

CrackZ.

PS - Don't suggest putting the drive in the freezer (I read that somewhere on a site) and it sounds like a totally crazy idea ;-).

i had a similar thing, dropped hdd, motor spun up but hdd didnt do a damn thing, so i thumped it on the top, and it came back to life, died shortly after i got the data off it though, the freezer thing is probably a similar idea, the drive mechanism gets jammed, u freezei it so the metal contracts, then as it warms up again it pops itself free, not such a mad idea

I tried the freezer thing on a harddrive I had gave up on, didn't work, though the theory sounds kinda sane.

CrackZ,

I have no idea where you live so I did manage to find an international service, first I'd check for bent pins, dislodged mini connectors etc: that sould be the only reason the drive is totally dead, I presume it doesn't make any noise or get hot - that would indicate a lack of power to the drive motor - don't go any farther than removing the control pcb - or all may be totally gone.

here's what I've found, you've probably already found this or similar:

http://www.vogon-international.com/disk/disk-recovery.htm

SiGiNT

CrackZ,
A friend once brought me a HD that refused to boot. The best I could do was get Windows to recognize that yes a HD was there, but it couldnt read it.. I tried many programs... The one that worked for me was Stellar Pheonix for Fat/NTFS. The HD was a 20 GB HD.. I was able to recover about 15GB of it. So in other words.. if you can get windows to at least say that a HD is connected to it. You can recover the data. Those data recovery solutions are VERY expensive, often in the thousnads (USD). If you would like the fixed version you can search for it on the usual places. The latest version is 2.2... but the latest fixed version is v2.1.... So if you can get the HD to at least spin up, then you should be able to recover some data from it. But be aware.. it took me almost 10 hours to recover the 15GB. A slow process but was well worth it
hope this helps you out.

HDD = Primarily 2 components

First: The actual HDD (the so-called "PLATTER"
Second: The nuts/bolts/motors/etc.

If you have not YET been tinkering around, chances are that the data is completely safe.

The first and best option is to request the HDD manufacturer (or the computer brand manufacturer - second option) to see what can be done. I understand they have some sophisticated machines that allow them to soak all the data off platters (unfortunately, available only in FACTORIES...so prolly your HDD may also get shipped to Malayasia, India, Phillipines...etc). You will be surprised but you may not have much choice is getting stores/companies that specialise in recovering nonfunctional physical HDD parts

Secondly on the query of 'recovery services' you'll find that MOST 'recovery services' (around 90-96% of them) focusing on getting the bits off a FUNCTIONAL hdd (that of course, is corrupt, formatted, deleted...etc) But your problem looks HARDWARE so its quite rare that a 'recovery company' can assist. My advise is that look for a HARDWARE electronics company specialising in computer hardware repair, that'll be a lot better than recovery services.

Finally, whatever you do, DO NOT try to PRY open the damn thing to get the platter out (Ha! I can reverse engineer the hardware too!) and then attempt re-input it in another platter (its not the same as taking a HDD from one computer and putting it in another - but you already knew that )

And hey, next time you could always use a HDD with a geo-shock capabilities (aww....these IBM thinkpad ads have me zombied anyways). Or you could have always cleaned your room like you were told to

Have Phun

Howdy,

Try the freezer, try the "thump".

Now we need to "open'er up". Check out the screws, they are probably Torx head. The screws look like a "star". Head to the hardare store that sells tools and tell'em "git me a Torx bit".

Lets get her opened up. After she's layin wide open before your very eyes, take a PLASTIC type utensil, such as a knife, and see if you can move the disk.
Move it from the outer diameter. Dont touch the surface (duh)
If it makes crunchy noises well, thats not good. (*)Throw it in the trash and get something to drink with alcohol in it. Consume many and then sleep


If you cannot move it freely, pick it up and hold the disk/motor in place and give her a shake to see what falls out. If stuff falls out, see above (*).

If nothing falls out, perhaps we can replace the motor.
You can get another motor off another drive and have at it.
You will need the soldering iron, really thick glasses to be able to see what your doing and see above(*).

I am not trying to be a prick but, here are a few "facts" :

1) As someone mentioned, recovery by most places involves a "working" drive.
2) The manufacturer will be more than happy to take your drive, tell you it doesn't work and then charge your credit card for their time.
3) They will take your money, tell you it works, then you get to find out how many sectors are junk.

I have been through this and have to say you can save some money and try to fix it yourself. It hit the floor and only the FBI/MI5/CIA/KGB could probably save it.

Woodmann

This is a very well-reputed Nordic company that fixes drives with all kinds of hardware failures, including completely broken motors and lots more. They are known to be one of the best in the world, and have some serious hard-core recovery equipment. They have among other things helped coalition forces to extract data from Iraqi harddisks that the owners had really tried to destroy, e.g. run a bolt through, filled them with glue etc.

I'd really recommend you contacting them to see what the price range for your case would be anyway.

http://www.ibas.com/america

Woodmann! OMG!,

Absolutely last resort - opening up and exposing the platter(s) surface - must be done in an absolutely clean environment, the heads only float much less than a hair's, (I was going to mention a certain, (gender), type but got politically correct at the last moment),width off the surface of the platter(s), dust or anything on the surface will eventually destroy the drive, if you get the drive running after following the procedure mentioned, dump the data quick then put the drive in a junk machine and watch it crash in a short while.

SiGiNT

And no it's not possible to transfer the platters to another drive, the alignment would never be correct.

Howdy,

Remember this drive is junk, anything goes when it comes to trying to recover the data.
Now grow some nads and have at it .

Oh, you can use the C-word, good luck .

Woodmann

yeh and the data's probably all pics and movies and mp3's of shania anyways ;p

Yeah, all his old Napster downloads, that's why he had all the blank CD's laying on the floor.

And yes! I have opened drives before and got them running, even installed, new platters, but, the platters were about 1 foot in diameter and held 2.5 megs - geesh I'm old!

SiGiNT

We could have a new record for the oldest person on the board .

Woodmann

Don't jump on the back of a fallen man, you bastards
CrackZ,who has all my respect is going through a really tough time, he lost a life worth of bytes in that hard drive, you such heartless insensitive dicks

How would you feel after your hard earned collection of animal Pr0n were there, wasted in the gutter??

I'll only be 37h in Nov.

Not bad when I put it that way! And as I've posted before my first RE challenges were on a TI99A. We were using PDP-11 clones at work, the OS was loaded via paper tape then written to those massive old Perkin Elmer 2 platter 5 meg drives.

SiGiNT

For everyones information ;-), I already told the recovery company that I'm totally not interested in any of the IDB's on the drive, however the loss of ANY MPEG's will result in immediate action from my legal team.

On a more serious note, before reading Woodmann's post I actually read some other site (something like deadharddrive.com), where a guy replaces his PCB, I could probably have tried that but there was some funky pin connector holding the PCB in place that I didn't want to yank to hard. I also read a few other places where people prised their drives apart and attempted to get some data from them and promptly succeeded in putting their data beyond recovery, softwares one thing, lifetime collection of shania nudes (something else ;-)).

Current situation, the drives gone away to a recommended company on this board ;p. In the course of ringing places I realised there truly are some cowboy data recovery outfits out there, I called one of them up and spent at least 10 minutes telling the guy "there isn't any fucking power to the drive so it isn't spinning" while he kept trying to convince me its just a "Windows software problem".

Also I got really varied prices, a few places were asking around $250 just to look at the drive (no guarantees) and then an open ended quote of $2000+ IF they could do something with it.

I'll let the board know how it goes (thanks for all the help), I'm also going to get the HD back so I can rip it to shreds ala 'the Woodmann technique', now theres an MPEG you'd pay good money to see..... ;-).

Regards

CrackZ.

Had a friends IBM shitstar drive crash the "apparently" old-fashioned way - one day it just up'ed and didn't bother anymore. Motor spinning, clicking, spinning, clicking, on and on. Found a company in DK willing to do a pre-analysis for free, which was nice. However, prices for actually getting the data off the drive (of which there was a definate possibility, I was assured) was 1.600+ US$. When it's hardware failure, it aint ever friggin cheap, but most often possible. A question of looking round, plenty of companies do it, and probably do it well.

Fake

Must admit, I fixed an old drive in the way woodmann says - I removed the top cover, turned it upside down to reduce the amount of dust falling on the platters, and then plugged it in. It span up but the heads didn't move. I moved the heads manually with a screwdriver(!) and reset the PC. Thing worked fine for a good few days afterwards, allowing me to get the needed data off the drive.

If the HDD gets dropped the most likely problem is the head actuator gets jammed against the stop, if it's a particularly large shock then maybe the disk surface got scratched. I got a dropped drive back in service by removing the cover screws, powering on the drive, then removing the cover. The turbulent wind surrounding the rotating platters keeps any dust from getting onto the surface. The head arm was stuck at the extreme center, but I freed it with a tap on the magnetic coil, and could move the head arm across the spinning disk without problem. Alignment is not an issue since the tracks are encoded on the platters themselves and servo system is used. That drive is still alive today, a year since it was dropped. No bad sectors or other problems have shown up.

Data recovery centers vary in quality and success rate (and thus price), the best I've seen claims to have 98% success rate. They usually charge per megabyte or gigabyte of data recovered. However they can most likely get the data off your drive (yours is simply a dropped drive, most DRCs also do flooded, burned, crushed, erased etc.)