Repairing hard drives [Archive] - Northern Sound Source

Mike Greene

09-20-2005, 08:30 PM

Technically, I suppose this is off topic since the hard drive in question is from a TIVO, but heck, hard drives is hard drives, right?

Anyway, the hard drive in my TIVO died. With rebates, buying a new TIVO was cheaper than repairing the old one, so now I've got this old TIVO begging me to experiment on it. It was hotrodded ( www.weaknees.com ) with a 240 gig drive, so there are some recorded shows I'd still like to get back. Nothing critical, so I don't want to send it out to one of them hard drive fixin' places, but desirable enough to spend an hour or two having some fun.

When it died, it made this click . . . click . . . click sound. My completely uneducated guess is the physical mechanism (that arm thing) is what went bad. So my first course of action will be to remove the drive and jiggle whatever jigglable parts I can find and see if it then works.

Second course of action will be to buy a similar drive, swap platters between the old and new drives and see if that works. That's pretty much the end of my ideas.

Do you think I have a shot with this, or will I be completely wasting my time? Any other ideas?

- Mike Greene

jkerr

09-20-2005, 08:42 PM

This may sound bizarre, but it is a proven fact that you can place a hard drive in a freezer overnight (but in a bag so it doesn't get ice on it) and place it back in your computer in the morning. There is about a 10%-20% chance of a broken hard drive firing back up long enough for you to retrieve your data. You have to move very quickly from the freezer to your pc though.

rob morsberger

09-20-2005, 09:31 PM

I think Jonathan is pulling your leg.

sghoughton

09-20-2005, 09:38 PM

I think Jonathan is pulling your leg.

He's not. It worked for me once. But it fixes a different problem - my drive was working for about 2 minutes after i turned on the computer. Then seemed to just die (wasnt recognized by the os, then the os froze). Freezing gave me about 8 minutes of run time. A few freezing sessions and i got all the essential stuff off it then just scrapped it.

steve

rob morsberger

09-20-2005, 09:42 PM

ha ha ha ha
you guys are really funny
what will you say next?

rwayland

09-20-2005, 09:47 PM

Well, the freezing method is worth a shot! Disassembly of a hard drive is close to impossible without causing further damage. They are built solidly! I have one I put outside to get rained on after I removed the housing, and could get no further. My intent was to destroy the data. but since March or so, and plenty of rain, very little sign of rust!

Richard

rob morsberger

09-20-2005, 09:56 PM

next you guys'll be telling me that leaving the drive out it the rain fixes it.
You slay me!

jkerr

09-20-2005, 10:17 PM

http://www.northernsounds.com/forum/images/smilies/ninja.gif I am really not pulling your leg. Google it if ya want. I'd at least try it before disassembling it.

fizbin

09-20-2005, 10:18 PM

For the click click click problem like they have said - put it in a sealed freezer bag and freeze it for a couple hours. Then pull your data off as fast as you can. If you can't get it all off before it thaws then refreeze and repeat.

THIS HAS WORKED for me on a few different occasions and is a widely known trick. Try it. You've really got nothing to lose. They're not pulling your leg.

fizbin

ohernie

09-20-2005, 11:02 PM

I don't know about the freezer trick and I did have a friend who claimed to have been able to take a drive apart back in the 20meg drive days and put it back together and still have it work. I wouldn't try it.

The problem is the heads ride on a cushion of air created by the spinning disk. There's two opposing goals. You want the heads as close to the platter as possible so as to maximize the flux (signal) but you don't want the head to come into contact with the platter - gouge time. Picture a Ferrari going around a circular track. Now, you open up the drive and a dust particle falls onto the platter. Picture a log falling on the track. Not pretty. Gouges the head and the platter and everything is lost.

Ernie

Nick Batzdorf

09-20-2005, 11:27 PM

Nick Batzdorf

09-20-2005, 11:47 PM

I think he's more of a Dale Carnegie drop-out.

:p

Worra

09-21-2005, 02:42 AM

I wouldn't attempt to open a harddisk and replace the physical disks. Neither would I attempt open heart surgery.
Now, I might succeed in both cases, but chances I blew it are pretty big.....
Freezer, well, never heard of it, might work. I've heard of people getting high smoking scrapings from banana peels.
Probably wont hurt you, but probably no effect.....

rob morsberger

09-21-2005, 07:11 AM

c'mon Worra.
The banana peels....that was you, wasn't it?

Worra

09-21-2005, 08:41 AM

c'mon Worra.
The banana peels....that was you, wasn't it?

http://www.sampletekk.com/images/banana.gif :|:

rob morsberger

09-21-2005, 09:09 AM

a dancing banana...
that's great!!

Worra

09-21-2005, 09:25 AM

a dancing banana...
that's great!!

What.... you actually see a dancing banana...???? You've been at those banana skins again, haven't you!

Mike Greene

09-21-2005, 12:21 PM

Hmmm . . . whack with a hammer . . . I think I'll move that one up to option one. Jiggling (Lee's method or otherwise :D ) moves to option 2 and freezing will be option 3. I'll save rubbing the drive with banana peel scrapings for last.

- Mike Greene

fizbin

09-21-2005, 03:09 PM

Never heard of the hard drive in the freezer trick? It's pretty well-documented among IT pros where sending it to an expensive data recovery tech is not an option.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2005-04%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=%22hard+drive%22+freezer&btnG=Search

Important though - once you've recovered your data, throw that hard drive out even if it seems to be working again. It will soon fail again - almost guaranteed.

fizbin

jsp2

09-21-2005, 03:19 PM

There's software on the market to (supposedly) diagnose/repair malfunctioning Hard drives… I've never tried it.

When my drive died on me.. I lost allot of info. I was desperate to the point of bringing it in to a specialist and have it retrieved.

Although it's expensive.. $200.00 - $500.00, I felt it was worth the effort for the amount of data on there.

There was too much damage for it to be retrieved.. I was asked if I tried to retrieve the data through an off the shelf "Hard Drive repair" program.. He pointed out that this method can cause more damage in itself.

I was never charged for the test.

But it may be an option for you if your data is valuable.

musikman

09-21-2005, 04:27 PM

Never heard of the hard drive in the freezer trick? It's pretty well-documented among IT pros where sending it to an expensive data recovery tech is not an option.

I´ve tried this trick, but it didn´t work for me! I´m just wondering what went wrong...
http://www.arrowsmash.com/1hd.jpg

http://www.arrowsmash.com/2hd.jpg

rob morsberger

09-21-2005, 04:47 PM

wow
that made my day
thanks musikman!!
it's the little things in life...

Rich Pell

09-21-2005, 09:06 PM

ROTFL !!!! :D That is too funny !! That made my night! Thanks ,Rich

rwayland

09-21-2005, 09:22 PM

I took a Mac that fell down in the '94 earthquake and wouldn't start to Les Mannus, the local Mac guru (sort of local - Glendale). He smiled, took out a hammer, and whapped the hard drive.

It started right up.

Well, I have repaired the pneumatic actions of player pianos by that method, except that I used a rubber mallet, but knew where to hit and why.

I have also replaced a few TV tuners that were "repaired" by that method.

Regarding the original problem, the best way of recovering lost data is from your very up to date backup system, external to your computer! Also, keep your data backup separate from your system backup. I backup my data almost daily, sometimes more, depending on what I have done. Some data is automatically backed up on a separate drive. All I have ever lost due to drive trouble has been a couple of email messages, and I now have that covered.

Richard

StrangeCat

09-22-2005, 04:18 AM

freeze hd huh...WHAHA ok
your hd isn't exactly dead you need to install Ontrack soft ware and go from there. ;)
and yes it works

kitekrazy

09-23-2005, 10:22 PM

Actually the freezer trick is quite common. But chance are 20% that it works.
Opening the drive may be hard to do. They usually require very small star shape wrenches. I don't think you can get those just anywhere.

fizbin

09-23-2005, 10:46 PM

freeze hd huh...WHAHA ok
your hd isn't exactly dead you need to install Ontrack soft ware and go from there. ;)
and yes it works

Ontrack is for recovering lost data, not fixing broken hard drives. Let's be clear - we are definitely talking about a failing hard drive here.

fizbin

StrangeCat

09-23-2005, 11:43 PM

fizbin

09-24-2005, 02:12 AM

no the software will kick the drive to work again. I speak from experience I had this summer, the clickty click, death sound. If you hook up your drive and it can be seen in windows then it can be fixed. of course yea if you can't see the drive in windows or the bios then it's not happen'n.
ja

The click click sound from a hard drive is the actuator hitting something like the disc, which means there is a physical problem with the drive. No software can target a physical problem like this and fix it. What you experienced was a coincidence. Likely what happened was that you a temporary malfunction resulting in perhaps some corrupt data. Ontrack most likely fixed your corrupt or lost data, but it had nothing to do with the clicking going away.

If your hard drive clicks, don't trust it with anything you want to keep. At the very least back up everything. It will fail.

fizbin

Nick Batzdorf

09-24-2005, 12:30 PM

Well, I have repaired the pneumatic actions of player pianos by that method, except that I used a rubber mallet, but knew where to hit and why.

I have also replaced a few TV tuners that were "repaired" by that method.

My approach is more random, and it's usually accompanied by swearing and extreme anger.

It feels really good.

ohernie

09-25-2005, 04:18 AM

As an FYI, I just had a drive go down and I decided to tackle it tonight. Windows XP wants to reformat it. Might be driver (as in my) error. I was using it as a single master and I had the jumper set for master w/slave present. Normally drives won't work at all with the wrong jumper config.

Freezer trick didn't work :rolleyes:

Anyway, I tried a few few program demo's on it and most of them said the partition info was severely damaged. Ontrack demo found the files but at $400+ it wasn't an option. I did a Google search and found "Hard Drive Scavenger" at:

http://www.quetek.com/index.htm

Demo found the files so I bought it - $45, I'm extracting files, and it seems to be working well. It's no Ontrack, but then neither is the price.

Ernie

jkerr

09-25-2005, 11:33 AM

Freezer trick didn't work :rolleyes:

Ernie

Just to clarify, since I originally brought up the freezer trick.......It only works on the "click, click, click" sound and at best about "10%-20%' of the time for only a few minutes after boot up (usually until the harddrive thaws). But those minutes can be precious. It won't help destroyed partitions.