How do you recover data when the HD is completely dead?

[elpres05]

When your hard drive doesn't boot, motors fail and you are absolutely hopeless but you know your data is still somewhere on the platters, how could you recover it without sending it to some recovery company?

Apparantly, a guy i know who does this and he ain't any employee of any company, worst of all he won't tell anyone how he gets data back from totally dead hard drives.

I was wondering if there is a special tool which you surface over the platters and ......... ???

 

[Soccerman06]

Magic would be my guess.

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

I suppose you could find the exact same model and swap out parts, but you'd need a clean room to anything of that sort.

 

[elpres05]

Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
I suppose you could find the exact same model and swap out parts, but you'd need a clean room to anything of that sort.

and if i say i opened my HD once, mistakenly got a finger print, cleaned it with IPA and the drive still continues to work flawlessly since then.

I don't think opening the drive and allowing a few dust particles to sneak in would destory the hard drive, never happened in my case.

Back to the question shall we...... there must be a tool, some sort of f******** device.

 

[Bassyhead]

Originally posted by: elpres05

Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
I suppose you could find the exact same model and swap out parts, but you'd need a clean room to anything of that sort.

and if i say i opened my HD once, mistakenly got a finger print, cleaned it with IPA and the drive still continues to work flawlessly since then.

I don't think opening the drive and allowing a few dust particles to sneak in would destory the hard drive, never happened in my case.

Back to the question shall we...... there must be a tool, some sort of f******** device.

A single dust particle can destroy the heads. The only thing keeping the heads from touching the platters is a cushion of air. The distance between a head and a platter is something like 1/100th the width of a human hair, so a dust particle in the path of a head would be catastrophic. If that dust particle stays in there, it's a matter of time before it gets blown around into the path of a head. There's a very good reason why these things are being built and assembled in clean rooms.

 

[DrPizza]

Maybe, assuming you can swap out parts from an identical drive, you can get it running long enough to recover the data?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: DrPizza
Maybe, assuming you can swap out parts from an identical drive, you can get it running long enough to recover the data?

Maybe, but if you care at all about your data you'll send it to a professional recovery company.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: elpres05

Originally posted by: JustAnAverageGuy
I suppose you could find the exact same model and swap out parts, but you'd need a clean room to anything of that sort.

and if i say i opened my HD once, mistakenly got a finger print, cleaned it with IPA and the drive still continues to work flawlessly since then.

If so, you were EXTREMELY lucky.

I don't think opening the drive and allowing a few dust particles to sneak in would destory the hard drive, never happened in my case.

It can. At the sizes we're talking about, almost anything can ruin a chunk of data.

Back to the question shall we...... there must be a tool, some sort of f******** device.

The only thing you can realistically try to do would be to replace the PCB. You MIGHT be able to switch out the motor if that is what is broken, but this is a much more delicate operation.

Reading data off the platters without destroying them requires extremely expensive specialized hardware. In a cleanroom.

 

[Remy XO]

Professional Recovery Companies use the same exact hard drive down to the model number and when it was made to switch platters and recover data. They charge hundreds of dollars because sometimes they need to pay hundreds of dollars to search for some hard drive models that are very hard to find.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Remy XO
Professional Recovery Companies use the same exact hard drive down to the model number and when it was made to switch platters and recover data. They charge hundreds of dollars because sometimes they need to pay hundreds of dollars to search for some hard drive models that are very hard to find.

This is sometimes done, but a large outfit would most likely remove the platters from the drive and use a high-resolution magnetic scanner to read the data off of them directly. This is also the only way to recover data from a drive that was zero-filled (you can detect differences in the magnetic field strength based on whether that bit was a '1' or '0' before the wipe), or if the platters were physically damaged (since putting them in another drive might not work).

 

[Future Shock]

Head on over to Storage Review, where they discuss data recovery quite a bit. Someone has even posted pictures and articles in the forums about "do it yourself" cleanrooms that have been built. Use the search function - it works over there, and it's good.

You haven't really given us any diagnostics to work with for the drive (sounds? spin up? etc.). Have you tried the freezer trick (i.e., placing the drive in a SEALED plastic bag with some dessicant packages, and putting it in the freezer to chill)? Be careful - it can only be tried once on a drive...

Future Shock

 

[trend]

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/245/1 there you go

 

[imported_carson]

I don't believe the people can do the data recovery at home and just read the book. If it is truth, why the people pay a few thousands for data recovery.

Anyway. Good luck

 

[stardrek]

Here is a step by step guide on how to do it... http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000840067578/