Hard drive Recovery myths and true solutions.

[greengiant912]

Hey all,

 

I have had a few hard drives fail on me in the past month and I was wondering what everyone thought about the myths out there to try and recover your data.

 

The few I have heard are. Putting your hdd in the freezer to expand the read heads, and tap it lightly with a hammer to try and knock the heads loose.

 

I have heard that the hammer trick works from time to time but its really hit or miss. I was just wondering if anyone else had any ideas.

 

I have been running backups for some time now as I have learned from past mistakes hehe however I was just currious about what everyone else thought and what rumors or myths you have tried. I was hoping to get a few more hours out of one of my drives as I am a poor college kid now lolz.

[a93j202k]

how did your drive fail, exactly?

[greengiant912]

how did your drive fail, exactly?

 

The drive heads stopped spinning. Not much you can do when a drive fails like that. I guy I know who has been in the industry for a long time said sometimes if you tap the hdd with a hammer lightly that it could knock the heads back and it starts working again. I tried it tonight no luck , there goes a 500gb hdd .

[Andrewr05]

I've never heard of the "hammer" trick but I used to have an old Compaq that required "force" to work properly...

 

 

We ended up giving it to my grandmother and she would always call to let me and my dad know that it stopped working, we'd drive over there try to turn it on and then do what we called the:

"Drop method"

(it was an old desktop style case; it lied horizontal)

 

We would take the whole computer, monitor and all, and pick it up about 4 inches off the desk and then drop it.

It worked perfectly fine every time, we could check all the wires before trying the "Drop method" and the computer would refuse to boot but it would always work after dropping it...

 

sadly the poor computer died a few years back, it was getting old anyways.

[Marne_Aeok]

lawlz

[scr4wl]

Sometimes if your lucky replacing the logic board will fix the HDD.

 

Just make sure it's teh same exact boad with the same exact number, this means you'll have to buy a brand new HDD of the exact same model. Unless you have important data there is really no point in this at all. First you bought a new HDD, and second it might not be the problem.

 

Anyway that's worked for me a few times.

[spectrascope]

Freezing overnight does actually work, I have used that method a few times shrink the heads and bearings back into compliance. Refrigeration would also work because generally after you freeze the drive it takes about ten minutes for the drive to reach an operating temperature at least that is ush what happens to me; Freeze overnight take out hook up to power and usb, plug in power and usb ten minutes later drive is ush found and data is retrievable for about an hour. note this does absolutely no good if your logic board is fried, a.k.a the drive does appear when hooked up to the computer, because even if the motor is bad in that case your drive is mostly likely done, windows will still detect drive it just can't do anything with it.

Edited March 3, 2009 by spectrascope

[IVIYTH0S]

My teacher has done the freezer worked then rapidly warmed the drive with a hair dryer, which gave him a good enough window of time to backup all his files. In fact I think that entirely fixed the drive and he told me it's still working now.