200 ways to revive a hard drive - Freeze it (Part II)

11.
How do you bring a hard drive back to life?
My situation:
Half of a volume set goes south on a WinNT server, no good backup and an angry boss screaming about
the data being mission critical.
My solution:
** A bit unorthodox but, it has saved my butt! **
•Turn off the server.
•Take out the failing hard drive and wrap a static bag around it.
•Throw it in the freezer conveniently located in the break room.
•Pray for 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
•Leaving the hard drive in the bag, quickly plug the drive back into the server. (Just plug the in cables and go.)
•Cross fingers, turn it on, and move all data off the drive as fast as you can! Then add a tape drive and start backing the dumb thing up!
My so-called logic:
Metal contracts when it is cold.... so the platters shrink and increase the clearance for the read/write heads.
12.
Put the drive in the freezer for about a week and then you can usually get one last read off the drive.
13.
Here are some drive recovery tricks that have worked for me, in the order that I do them. Try booting the
drive and copying the data off after every step.
1. Hold the drive upside down, making gravity change the head geometry ever so slightly. Vertical is also
another option.
2. Slightly rap the drive with your knuckle, (but nowhere near hard enough to damage the drive).
3. Try the drive in another machine, (slight drive voltage change assumed to be the miracle worker here).
4. Rap the drive just SLIGHTLY harder than you did above in 2.
5. Freeze the hard drive in the freezer for two hours, and place in a plastic zip lock bag to prevent
condensation from forming on the drive when you plug it back into the system, (head geometry, electrical
resistance lowered, electrical contact points adjusted, etc., assumed to be the miracle here).
6. After the drive warms up to room temperature or better, rap it even harder with your knuckle this time.
7. Repeat all of above steps on next day, as sometimes I've gotten data off drive simply by trying again.
14.
Hmmm sounds like a toughy to me. Back in the old days when I first started teching, if we ran into a problem like this, there were only a few ways to deal with it. I will go over these options now:
QUESTION: What do you think you can do about this, Mr. Tech?
First Answe—r—Nothing, your computer is too old, and the data on there is not really of that much importance. If you really want it back, you can get a hold of a company called "Total Recall" out of Denverand get charged thousands of dollars to get your files back. Besides, with Y2K, this machine ain’t gonna run anyway, and prices are so low right now, there is no reason why you should not upgrade now.
2) Well, I can take it back to the shop and pretend like I know what I am doing for 3-6 hours. Then I will call you the for the next week and a half giving you excuses as to why I am not able to get your information off of that hard drive. Of course, I won’t charge you anything, but I will expect compensation for all the time I wasted on your hard drive.
3) I could take the hard drive out of your machine, plug into my Secondary IDE controller, and boot up. Hope fully, I can see your hard drive and have the ability to copy all of your files to a temp folder on my
machine called "Your Name." After I collect all information, I would run IBM's WIPE on the drive and then a thorough scandisk, just to see if the cause was sunspot related or not. If......this was not working, then extreme temperatures always have a way of talking older hard drives into giving us what we want. I would then wrap the HD in a Zip lock bag and slam it in the freezer for 12 hours. Pull it out the next day and very quickly plug it into my machine, copying what I can as quickly as possible until the drive dies again, repeating until all files are copied and safe. If.....that don’t work, move onto the extreme heat. A Shrink wrap gun works best, but a hairdryer will do the trick if that is all you have. Wrap one end of the HD in a
towel and use the shrink wrap gun or dryer to heat the hard drive. Very quickly plug it in and copy files until finished. Repeat until all necessary files are copied and you are done.
You may not think it works, but when you are down to that as your last option...it does.
15.
Solution:
•Carefully remove it from the computer.
•Place it in the freezer for 24 hours, then put it back in the computer. You should have approximately 30 minutes of good spin time left before a fina–l—and much more permanen–t—shut down. This problem often arises from a catastrophic hard disk crash—bearings are usually the culprit, coupled with badly worn read/write heads. I've used this technique on many computers throughout the last fifteen years as "resident expert" and saved virtually all important data. If you're in a pinch for time, such as critical data needed for a briefing in twenty minutes, you can opt for the more drastic cooling technique—a C02 fire extinguisher...
16.
Here is a solution for really dead drives: ones that won't spin or ones that make those funny grinding noises: Put the drive in the fridge for a few hours. This can shrink up something inside that might let it run long enough to get critical data. If not, try the freezer for a few more.
This actually has worked for me in the past.
17.
Things we have done in the past that worked:
1. Remove the drive, grab it, and shake the hell out of it: "What could it hurt? It's not working anyway…."
2. Place the drive in a freezer for about 10 minutes.
3. Open the drive case in a laminar flow-hood, and give it a spin. (Once it was closed up and reinstalled, it worked long enough to suck the data off of it.)
4. Swap the logic board with one on another drive of the same type.
Numbers 1, 2, and 3 worked with older Seagate (which we no longer purchase) drives, which were prone to "stiction" problems. Number 4 worked following an electrical surge (lightning strike), since the data on the platters were still there and OK.
18.
Depending on the drive failure I have had success with some rather extreme solutions to data recovery.
Symptom: Invalid Drive Specifications
Treatment: Basic Check your cmos battery
Check your IDE cable and connections
Check your jumper settings
Remove all other IDE connections but the drive in question
Advanced Try disk manager software
Try data recovery software
Use a bios upgrade card ($39) and allow it to setup the drive
Look up the drive specifications on the manufacturer’s Web site and plug them in manually.
Turn Off or On Write Precomp—32bit disk access
Symptom: Drive does not spin up: "Sticktion"
Treatment: Basics Lightly tap the side of the drive case with a screwdrive–r—no power
Lightly tap the side of the drive case with a screwdriver–—power on
Advanced Cold soak the drive: Freeze in a zip-lock bag
Spray drive case with inverted can of canned air
Lightly slap the drive on a desk top: (mild frustration)
Repeated hammering of the drive on a desk top: (last resort—total
frustration only)
Symptom: Invalid media type
Treatment: Basics Boot with a FAT32 Windows 95 boot disk Sys the drive
Advanced fdisk /mbr
Check for a virus from a known clean boot disk
These are but a few techniques for the doomed platters. These techniques can be used in conjunction with one another to arrive at the desired solution. Lather, rinse, and repeat if necessary.