Comments on: Hard drive resurrection

By: Nii

Nii — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:38:48 +0000

Please can you help me out
i have a maxtor 80GB harddisk it used to work for sometime an lately it can not be detected by bios
i will really lyk to use it again
pls help me

By: Turkish

Turkish — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:18:23 +0000

I have a 40gb ide toshiba drive which is out of my g4 powerbook,i can hear it spinning nice and smoothly,it doesn’t grind or make any out of the ordinary noises it’s even recognised when i connect it to my imac via a firewire caddy.it just keeps coming up as locked or the software i have used just freezes\stops responding .has anyone any ideas on any mac software i can use or what i can do…..thanks

By: Hopefully Lucky

Hopefully Lucky — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:02:37 +0000

Hi,

My 80gb Hitachi Deskstar fell may be 2 feet and now the hard drive does not even spin. I have put it in the freezer and I will try to get it going tonight. If that does not work, what are my options? I have some pictures of my kids from 10 years ago on it and would like to retrieve them. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

By: DAvid

DAvid — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:05:53 +0000

I just had a 1.5 TB hard drive that the spining motor just died, bought a second identical hard drive and put the 4 plates into the new one with god motor, now it spins but no reading, is there any way to allign the plates or just read each one appart or something, the data there is very important !!! please help !

By: jim emerson

jim emerson — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:26:04 +0000

No edit huh? sorry no s in would etc. What knid of alcohol? lol kind is a joke ok

By: jim emerson

jim emerson — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:18:16 +0000

Ok, Lots of comments, some interesting and true some , well, whatever works for you.
I have watched 13 vids by scott moulton forensics expert on youtube visited his site myharddrivedied visited myrids of other sites and still one simple answer to what I would think is a simple question, what can be used to physically clean platters, doesn’t get answered?
Some have hinted at q-tipsand 99.99 isorypol alcohol. Is there something better to clean cappacino and window cleaner off a platter lol?
According to those vids, realinment of muliple platters is impossible as on micro off would not let the heads read as info is stored all the way down , although in another vid he shows a locking device that hold them together, I never have done it, but I woulds suggest watching those vids very strongly.

By: Mike S

Mike S — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:03:58 +0000

Read the article here…

Googling the first sentence resulted in a good link:

http://www.drownout.com/blogsavemyharddrive/2006/01/hard-drive-resurrection-hack-day.html

By: Nic Wood

Nic Wood — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:32:45 +0000

Looks like a very useful article. I just cant find it or a link to it. Could somebody point me in the right direction please?

By: Gaiel

Gaiel — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:29:31 +0000

Same question : where can the article be seen? Thanks.

By: AKS

AKS — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 17:53:22 +0000

Where’s the article or video or blog…all I see is a pic, with 208 comments??????

By: tns

tns — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 19:40:07 +0000

Try drive orientation:

After 5yrs of daily use, the PATA toshiba drive in my laptop refused to boot. I could see the first bootloader messages onscreen, but then only read errors. The drive made some ugly clunking and buzzing noises that made me think there were serious mechanical problems. I tried the freezer trick and was encouraged since it almost got to the login, but further freezer sessions did not do much. I tried putting the drive in a 2nd bay, but it was not recognized at all. It is very easy to remove the pcb on this drive (same model as here: http://www.freewebs.com/bgotchall/index.htm), so I removed, inspected and remounted the pcb. Everything looked OK.

Someone posted that the orientation of the drive might be a factor, so I used a USB enclosure and began powering it up in different positions (flat, upside down, on edge..). In most cases a drive letter would appear for the drive, but xP claimed it was unformatted, and no other tool could even see it. I then held the drive in a vertical position (connector end up), and when powered, the drive and folders were visible! I ran a quick scan with a recovery tool and it found no problems to fix. By carefully propping the drive in this vertical position, I was able to pull off what I needed and even do a complete image copy. The drive continues to work in this position despite the noises, but as soon as I put it in any other position it makes more angry noises and stops working.

I later saw on a drive recovery infomercial that all the drives in their lab are held in a vertical orientation. It’s definitely worth a try. From this experience I’d guess that serious platter damage is rare, and the drive is not going to degrade that quickly. I wouldn’t rush to open up that drive until you had tried all these other techniques.

By: Arsinte Andrei

Arsinte Andrei — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:08:06 +0000

Hello All!
Please help me ….. It is possible anyware in this world to put the platters back if you move and separate them? I know the order but I don’t know the positioning. any chance to recoveri like that.. or to read one by one and put them together and then to recover the data? please help my .. send my an email on arsinte_andrei@yahoo.com.
Thanking you and best regards.
Andrew

By: chiphazard

chiphazard — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:22:39 +0000

freezing??that’s something new to me…i have 2 def. laptop hdds and i would love to try that. how long should you freeze an hdd?? and how long will it stay alive when used?

By: morin

morin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:12:44 +0000

hi!
ive disassembled a hard drive, and i would like to know if it is possible to make it spin with a 9v battery and how should i do it.. thnx ::)

By: oliver

oliver — Tue, 20 May 2008 23:30:21 +0000

hello everyone
i replac my hard disk head and it not working !!! its head have dumy movment and not ditect .. and ….is it dead is anyone can help me pleac send me a messeg a im wating for help

nitornit@yahoo.com

thanks .