so my 1TB is dead yer...

and i was thinkin if anyone has ever attempted to do a fix yaself, one idea wud be to build a small box with hoover stuck to it sucking out all the dust then a pair of marrygolds attached to 2 holes in the box, giving u a DIY dust free environment to dismantle the drive in

and then do wat, hhmmm maybe transfer the platters or replace the chip board? who knows why it went faulty in the first place

would anyone feel confident attempting this or does it sound daft, if all it is is swapping out something then surely this wud save £100's going to a specialist company

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tiersten

Lee H wrote: »

and i was thinkin if anyone has ever attempted to do a fix yaself, one idea wud be to build a small box with hoover stuck to it sucking out all the dust then a pair of marrygolds attached to 2 holes in the box, giving u a DIY dust free environment to dismantle the drive in

That wouldn't be dust free. Unless you have a specially constructed facility with special air filters, you're not going to be able to get a clean room suitable for modern HD repair.

Lee H wrote: »

and then do wat, hhmmm maybe transfer the platters

You won't be able to get it working again if you do that. You do not have the ability to realign or mount the platters with the precision required.

Lee H wrote: »

or replace the chip board?

If you can find another drive of the same capacity, model and revision then maybe. It may not work still and you'd have just voided the warranty and possibly broken another drive though.

Lee H wrote: »

would anyone feel confident attempting this or does it sound daft,

Extremely unlikely that you'll be able to repair it yourself.

Lee H wrote: »

if all it is is swapping out something then surely this wud save £100's going to a specialist company

It costs a ton of money for a reason.

UnixGeek

tiersten is right. Try to open that drive up to swap out the platters, and you'll just do more damage.

Your two low-cost options are going to be:

- If you can get the drive to spin up, run ddrescue to take an image, then use your recovery tool of choice on the resulting image
- If you think it's a circuit board issue, replacing it with a board from the exact same model may get things going again.

I wouldn't try either of those steps if the data to be recovered is valuable enough to pay a specialist.

NightShade03

Does the drive even spin up?

Lee H

no it doesnt even spin up, kids pics n videos are the only great loss

and yer, it now does sound like a daft idea

thanks for all ur info

would changing the circuit board mean opening the drive up, or is the main board what u see underneath the drive

tiersten

Lee H wrote: »

no it doesnt even spin up, kids pics n videos are the only great loss

Up to you whether you want to ask one of those drive recovery places how much it'd cost for them to look at.

Lee H wrote: »

would changing the circuit board mean opening the drive up, or is the main board what u see underneath the drive

Generally the board you see underneath is it. Inside the enclosure would be the platters, heads, actuators and motor. Everything else would be on the PCB stuck to the bottom.

Bokeh

I looked into data recovery recently with one of the chain companies (Data Doctors). They quoted me $350 for a 4gb flash drive, and $500 to START for a 40gb hard drive. I was able to get the drive working enough to back up what was needed to a portable drive.

NightShade03

If you really want the data recovered go to Staples. They don't do it onsite they ship it out to a partner, however they pull the whole drive no matter what size for $1500. They will copy it to a new drive for you and send it back. Generally takes 7-17 days. Had a few friends that used their service with all positive feedback.

TheShadow

NightShade03 wrote: »

If you really want the data recovered go to Staples. They don't do it onsite they ship it out to a partner, however they pull the whole drive no matter what size for $1500. They will copy it to a new drive for you and send it back. Generally takes 7-17 days. Had a few friends that used their service with all positive feedback.

that price is pretty reasonable especially if they have a class A clean room. Problem is he is in the United Kingdom, don't know if they have Staples there.

@Lee H: in case you are still thinking about your kludge. A drive has a minimum of a two micron filter. Clean rooms filter the air to 1 micron. That is smaller than the bacteria in bread or beer yeast. Cigarette smoke would cause a head crash if it came in direct contact and got between the platter and a flying head.

I spent a lot of time in clean rooms and bunny suits; not pleasant!

You say the motor does not spin up? it could be a bad connection on the mylar ribbon cable. Most drives have one going to the motor from the controller board. If you have an old drive around you could dismantle it to familiarize yourself with it. You will probably need a set of small security bits.

Lee H

TheShadow wrote: »

You say the motor does not spin up? it could be a bad connection on the mylar ribbon cable. Most drives have one going to the motor from the controller board. If you have an old drive around you could dismantle it to familiarize yourself with it. You will probably need a set of small security bits.

So there is some kind of repair that I could do, the drive makes no noise and has no vibration watsoever wen plugged in, thing is ive only had it 3 months so its still in warranty, there is a brand new replacement just sitting there waiting for me in the shop

This mylar ribbon you mention, will this have been dislodged somehow, by openeing up another drive just to see how this is put together how will that help me fix my other drive?

TheShadow

no it should be on the side of the circuit board that is not visible. You don't actually open the drive as that is the top plate please remove that thought. Voids your warranty if you care at this point.

On Seagate drives the circuit board does not cover the motor and you can see the clear mylar ribbon going from the motor and disappearing under the circuit board. Makes it easy to check for cold solder joints also. I believe that some drives also have an interlock if the head actuator does not return to park preventing spin up. So it could be the actuator ribbon also. I have two 1 gig samsungs but I don't remember what they look like.

I used to collect old ones and open the top up and spin them up for my students. We would time how long it took for a head crash. seconds for some hours for others.

oh one other thing new drives are very quiet now a days. Sometimes you can only tell they are spinning is to listen to the faint click as the heads seek to track zero or to actually hold them and move your hand feeling the gyroscopic action. The drives sold as green drives are very quiet because the spin is dropped to 5400 RPM.

Mishra

Hard drives are pretty resilient. My friend modified his and put a clear plastic window in it so you could see it in action. And it had 0 bad sectors when he was done.

JDMurray

Consider the possibility that the problem is the controller circuit board attached to the drive and not the electro-mechanics of the drive itself. I've fixed a number of drives by simply replacing the controller with the board from an identical drive. This is real easy to do with USB/FW/eSATA portable drives that have a connector that plugs into a controller module.

I've also worked around controller issues by moving an EIDE drive from master to slave, where the new master drive supplied the controlling functionality that was malfunctioning on the bad drive, and the bad drive worked as a slave.

Of course, if a controller board goes bad it could trash the file system by causing spurious, random writes to the media; the only way to recover from that scenario is by restoring a backup to a new drive.

tiersten

Mishra wrote: »

Hard drives are pretty resilient. My friend modified his and put a clear plastic window in it so you could see it in action. And it had 0 bad sectors when he was done.

I wouldn't trust any drive that had been modified in that fashion. Hard drives are manufactured in a clean room and have air filters built into them for a reason. The heads float extremely close to the surface of the platters. It just takes 1 piece of dust in the wrong place for that head to smack into the platter and ruin the drive and your day. This isn't FUD spread by the drive recovery people. They really do float that closely to the platter and are easily damaged.

There are plenty of stories online about people who have performed a similar mod to their drives. Some had no problems at all with that drive until they upgraded it. Other people had no problems initially but had a random drive failure at some later point. Whilst other people had a dead drive immediately.

steve_f

As a last cheap resort, maybe try Spinrite

GRC|SpinRite Data Recovery Technology

TheShadow

steve_f wrote: »

As a last cheap resort, maybe try Spinrite

GRC|SpinRite Data Recovery Technology

You are not on the same page. He has spinwrong right now.

The drive does not spin up i.e. bad motor or missing motor start signal from the circuit board.

Lee H

just bought a new 1 TB drive exact same as my other one, changed over the controller circuit board, the drive now spins up but fails to show in BIOS or Windows, also there is a huge delay on start up and when windows does finally come on there are no sata drives, I have another sata 300 GB in perfect working order this fails to come on because my old 1 TB is connected

any ideas

maybe the freezer trick will work now that the drive spins up

JDMurray

Try it on another computer and see if you get the same results. The SATA controller in the motherboard might be bad. I just "fixed" this problem in one of my servers by installing a new SATA/RAID card to bypass the flaky SATA controller in the server's mobo.

Also, the "freezer trick" only gives you about 10 minutes of operational time to copy off your data. That's great for smaller drives, but with these giant, modern hard drives that take an hour or more to copy gigs of data, you gotta jump in and copy your most precious files first. If it works, keep refreezing until you get all your data or the freezing no longer works.

Lee H

I tried it on my other pc. hangs on boot and when I disconnect the drive it boots up as normal. is this pointing to anythin in particular if the read write arm is jammed wil the frezer unjam it well miffed at this just spent 60 quid hoping it wud work again was over the moon when I felt the drive spin up but was short lived when bootup took ages

thanksfor all ur help guys. willing to try anything at this point

JDMurray

Lee H wrote: »

I tried it on my other pc. hangs on boot and when I disconnect the drive it boots up as normal.

Is the drive connected through SATA or USB? Computers with older BIOSes do not support larger drives and will hang during the drive detection phase. I have several computers with very old BIOes that will hang on boot-up if my 1TB USB backup drive is connected and powered on. The only way I can use it on those machines is to let the OS fully boot and then turn the drive on.

Lee H

I cannot remember if i ever did connect the 1 TB drive to my other PC, motherboard is Abit SG-95, really cant lash out another 25-30 for a drive caddy to test this theory, will try the freezer trick soon and let you know what happenes

thanks for your help JD