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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Will-i-am on January 02, 2006, 01:16:04 AM
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The other day I looked at the stack of old hard drives I have and it occured to me that one of them likely has that great anim my daughter made when she was about 6-7 years old on "The Talking Animator". She worked on it for a long time and it was very advanced for her age. She even figured out how to have words that you couldn't see but the Amiga would speak. Anyway the thing never got backed up because it was too big for a floppy or something and when the drive fried I thought it was gone for sure but I kept the drive "just in case". Now I know there are utilities and services that can recover information from a hard drive, people in the PC world do it for businesses all the time. In fact the government sometimes throws out old hard drives that happy techy guys grab from the dump and recover classified information.
But what do Amigans do with drives that just stop working if the information contained therein is important enough? Is there a way to get that animation or is it as dead as we thought? It was off my A2000, originally on a Supra board, scsi and all that. The card was okay because my buddy Larry sent me a new drive and we just connected it and away we went. Somebody out there know if we have a chance? She has mentioned that animation and some others she made many times and since she's about to graduate from college with an art degree I thought it would make a nice gift.
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Did you try to salvage any data from the drive at the time with Disksalv or QB Tools? That might work unless the drive is totally dead. You could connect it to a PC with a SCSI card and try the same with WinUAE I suppose too.
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Merc wrote:
Did you try to salvage any data from the drive at the time with Disksalv or QB Tools? That might work unless the drive is totally dead. You could connect it to a PC with a SCSI card and try the same with WinUAE I suppose too.
The drive was flat freakin dead. No pulse. Booting with a Workbench disk and using HDToolbox showed no sign of the dead drive. We thought it might be the card so we started testing the card with a drive we knew to be alive. It went up just fine. My thinking is that since the drive is not much more than a big fat floppy the physical makeup of the little magnetic particles should be relatively unchanged and maybe the mechanism that reads the drive is trashed but mightn't there be some way to mount the platters into another mechanism and then read the data off to another working drive? That was the thrust of my thinking.
Hmmm, re the Winuae, it might be something I could try if I had a PC that could handle scsi drives and was powerful enough to run the emulator, but what I have here is an old Sony Vaio I got when my sister upgraded. Once my daughter goes to school in Europe later in the month, she says I can take over the PC she owns, which is powerful enough to run WinUAE and I can try something from there if it's possible, but I'm not sure what to do about the scsi compatibility. As little Eva once said, "I don't know nothin' bout mounting no scsi's, Miss Scarlett!"
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You say the drive is dead, does it spin up and make the usual noises ? if not there is no chance of getting any data off the drive in that state.
All is not lost however, the problem could be on the PCB that controls the drive, if you can find an identical working drive (exactly the same make and model), you could swap over the PCB and try that. I've used that trick before, although it does help that I tend to work on large sites where there are 1000's of identical machines so finding an exact match is not too difficult, your old drive might be a bit more of a challenge to find another one of the same type, but you never know your luck ;-)
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Now I know there are utilities and services that can recover information from a hard drive, people in the PC world do it for businesses all the time. In fact the government sometimes throws out old hard drives that happy techy guys grab from the dump and recover classified information.
Yes, it is posasible to recover data from a dead HDD and there are companies who do it. But they take a lot of money for it. Usually a lot more than a normal person is ready to spend (anything between 500 and 10000 Euro is possible, depending on the damage).
There are no utilities which can wake up a drive that does not appear in HDToolbox or FDisk or BIOS or whereever. The dead HDD has to be disassembled in a laboratory and the data has to be read by special machines.
Bye,
Thomas
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@Will-i-am:
If the harddrive spins up - the motor is working, it might be so that the controller card on the harddrive is broken (the circuit board usually mounted underside the harddrive), but the discs and heads inside the harddrive are ok.
If so, if you could find an identical harddrive, you could take the controller card from that one and replace the possible broken one you have.
/Patrik
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I totally agree with everything stated here so far. There are recovery places that could probably recover that drive, but they are expensive.
If the drive spins up (or perhaps even if it does nothing at all) it MAY be the logic board. That IS a (delicately!) replacable part. It must be sourced from an absolute identical drive, though. (not just same model/interface, but exactly same model, capacity, edition, etc...) eBay would probably be your friend in finding an identical drive.
Once you get the drive up, back it up to a new drive as the very first thing you do. :-)
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If all else fails, and you DO have a twin hard drive, swap the darned disk itself! I've done this several times. It's not like you going to run the thing more than once to back it up. Just make sure your work space is as clean as possible, and dust free! Be VERY careful doing the work, and it will work.
I can already see hackles raising, but this really does work with being clean and careful.
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yeah, I thought this would be... interesting... but wottheheck, one more curious project to approach. I suppose I could take the old A2000 apart, assuming it's not the A2000 currently up and running. It would be a shame to operate on that one now that everything seems to work right.
But there are 2 more over there and if one of them is the right one, then I'll test the old HD and see what gives. I suppose there should be a way to check the various parts as well... my friend across the street does stuff like that for paper mill computers and I sold him my Willys Jeep for half what I originally paid for it. (My back has gotten to a point where crawling under trucks repairing master cylinders is not an option.) If the drive does not spin up or anything, which might be the case, I couldn't exactly lose anything by going deeper into the mechanisms.
Wish Larry was still alive, he had stacks of old HDs in his office, that's how I got a good replacement. Well, I'll just have to do the best I can. If anything comes of this I'll post a follow-up
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motrucker wrote:
... I can already see hackles raising, but this really does work with being clean and careful.
Hackles raised: Generally this is not a good idea. I guess most people know, but HD's must stay very clean to work. You're likely to introduce more problems (hat's off to motrucker: you must be a great house keeper). Better to try a control board swap first, and leave the internal chambers clean. If it still doesn't spin up, then maybe try your luck with more drastic measures.
Also worth noting, is that some drives may refuse to spin-up intermittently, but still work sometimes. Did you try the drive many times? I've used a number of Amigas which had to be 'started' three or four times before booting.
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See:
http://www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf
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When you think about old 33" LPs the needle would always gather fluff on it after a while. The floppy disks would have a thin lining of fabric to catch dust particles - but a hard disk doesn't have this.
Now consider the fact that each square millimetre on a hard disk platter could be responsible for 10MB of data, moreso if you consider the way data is laid out in clusters etc. then you are taking a serious risk by opening up the disk. One speck of 0.3micron dust potentially cause a bad block or something!
I've read of hard disk recovery services being offered, not sure how much it would cost. I think I saw something in a catalogue such as Insight or Action.com... but those are UK based.
If you're desperate to get at the animation without paying hundreds of dollars then maybe you've got nothing to lose - just do your vacuuming the night before (to allow airborne dust to settle), take a shower and wear a hairnet.
:-) :-) :-)
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If you're desperate to get at the animation without paying hundreds of dollars then maybe you've got nothing to lose - just do your vacuuming the night before (to allow airborne dust to settle), take a shower and wear a hairnet.
:-) :-) :-)
okay, okay I can take all kinds of ideas from the silly to the sublime but the idea that I might have to dust my house, jump in the shower and wear a hairnet in order to see my daughter's 15 year old animation.... unless there's dust in the house. Dust in the House?? Son, I have dustballs under this desk that have begun to evolve thumbs! Just the other day one offered to install Jet Set Billy on the A2000! I DID find another data disk with one of her anims but so far it looks like the dead scsi HD is the most likely repository of the nice long one with teddy bear's building houses and such. I have a plan, but it involves the two newest antique A2000's and their HDs. No, I can't justify paying anyone to try to extract the data the scientific way. We're gonna try the tried and true 'whack it with a stick' kind of approach, or a variation of it: 'plug it in, turn it on. Plug it in again differently, turn it on...' etc. might work and it beats dusting the room.
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Did you read the pdf linked to in BadBigBen's post? Some good hints in there. The refigeration technique sounds like a good idea. I would avoid heating though, as it randomises particle direction, and increases noise, losing magnetic signatures on the platter surfaces. One could consider it as a second last resort, prior to vacuuming etc.
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I would vote the Dyson vacuum cleaner my 2nd favourite piece of design below the Amiga. Beautifully thought out and with a dust filtration of 99.97% it is almost good enough for microchip fabrication plants let alone for those with asthma.
I read somewhere that someone's hard disk bearings had seized so they put the thing in the oven - unseizing the bearings so that data could be recovered!
Bare in mind though that if ever anyone has data that is so precious they simply must have it (and can afford the money) a lot of labs not only offer an engineering solution to your data recovery but also a forensic solution - magnetic hysteresis can recover data on a platter that has been Full Formatted 20 times...
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I use a dyson too. Damn good.
Heating definitely can work, but I would try freezing first.
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Oliver wrote:
I use a dyson too. Damn good.
Heating definitely can work, but I would try freezing first.
Agreed, Dysons SUCK !
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Hyperspeed wrote:
....Now consider the fact that each square millimetre on a hard disk platter could be responsible for 10MB of data, moreso if you consider the way data is laid out in clusters etc. then you are taking a serious risk by opening up the disk. One speck of 0.3micron dust potentially cause a bad block or something!
:-) :-) :-)
I did not offer this idea as a fix, but a way to reteive the info on the drive. It really does work. BTW, I live with two young kids and dog who sheds canstantly.
How do you think the pros do this? same way (granted they usae a clean room).
This IS a last resort! but it works nore often than not.
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I'm not disputing it'll work, in fact I might go on eBay and look for spare drives identical to mine should I ever hear that ping-pong sound of a bearing failure.
I did read about something in some disk drives to do with air pressure and venting, I wonder if hard disks have their own air purification filters?
Anyway, good luck finding the animation. I found an old animation in my disk box recently made with Deluxe Paint 4 AGA... never worked out how to add sound to coordinate with the frames...
:-)
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Hyperspeed wrote:
I wonder if hard disks have their own air purification filters?
Yes they do, well, nothing that looks high-tech, it's a fine paper / cloth filter, have you ever seen on a hard drive's casing "Do not cover this hole" - That's the hard drive breather hole, under which is the air filter.
There's usually a small sachet of silica gel hidden inside as well to absorb any moisture that does get in there.
I have stripped down several hard drives, if you are careful, you can do all of the above without a clean room. Eating a jam sandwich or a sticky toffee pudding while working on a hard drive is not really recommended ;-) , but all of this can be done, all this talk of having to send a hard drive to a high cost lab is utter nonsense.
These are the facts (As written by me, a computer engineer who has been doing this stuff for the last 18 years :-) )
If the hard drive is spinning and being recognised by the OS, then software recovery tools will usually get the job done.
If the drive is not spinning or seen at all, i.e. not even at the lowest level then you have a more serious fault which will probably mean getting out your screwdrivers.
If the PCB is the cause of the fault, which is the most likely - it's the most complicated part of the system, changing it with an IDENTICAL (same revision, same firmware) one will solve your problem.
If you still need to go further, then changing the head assembly (if the drive is spinning, this is the easiest bit to do) or moving the platters across to another drive is all perfectly possible.
Lots of people seem to be guessing at what is possible and what is not, believe me, all of the above is possible to do with some very basic tools, I've probably not covered all the different possibilities here,
It's all a myth, probably created by the same people who tell me I can't replace surface mount components with a standard soldering iron, hmm, so this is not a DMA fixed AmigaOne I have here is it then, must be a figment of my imagination.
All this comes down to knowledge of what is needed to be done, special tools, expensive clean rooms, all a big money making con
:-)
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One thing I had considered though is this - when HDToolBox maps out a bad block or low level formats a hard disk, is this updated information stored somewhere on the platter or in the drive's logic?
If it's stored on the board then wouldn't replacing the platters be lethal?
Also, don't you really have to make sure you put the platters back in the right order? I imagine this would be for the very brave, no good leaving the room and coming back after forgetting what goes where!
It's reassuring what you say though, maybe we should all make a point of not only backing up our software - but backing up our hardware!
Race ya to eBay!
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when HDToolBox maps out a bad block or low level formats a hard disk, is this updated information stored somewhere on the platter or in the drive's logic?
It is saved as a file on the hard drive, I can't remember if it was HDToolBox or QBTools, but one of them creates a file called bad.blocks, that file just uses those bad blocks so nothing else will try and write to them.
As for bad blocks that you never get to know about, i.e. those that the drive maps out automatically, thats a different story. All drives have defects, older drives used to have the defect list printed on them, and you would need to enter this list into your formatting software to tell it not to use those areas, but new drives do this internally and try to present themselves to the OS as perfect disks by automatically remapping spare blocks. Only when it can no longer do this will the drive actually admit to you that it has a problem.
As for where this information is stored, I am not sure if it's platters or logic, anyone else know that bit ?
(I know a lot about how this stuff works, but I don't know everything ;-) )
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I have a tool I keep in the Expansion directory called 'Probe SCSI':
ftp://de.aminet.net/pub/aminet/disk/misc/ProbeSCSI008.lha
If you type in the CLI - probescsi 0 (or whatever unit your hard disk is on) then at the bottom of the readout it will display a 'Primary Defects List' and a 'Grown Defects List'.
I swapped my old hard disk when I saw the 'Grown Defects' had increased since I bought it, I'm just wondering if this is the drive's own intelligience mapping out the bad blocks... wonder if flash drives do the same (I've heard compact flash cards do since they're prone to a limited number of write cycles).
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Hyperspeed wrote:
Anyway, good luck finding the animation. I found an old animation in my disk box recently made with Deluxe Paint 4 AGA... never worked out how to add sound to coordinate with the frames...
:-)
Re the sound thing, there's an old great animation editor called Animation Station that I used on my A2000s and it was the easiest thing you ever saw for coordinating sound to frames. I've seen other programs where you essentially write a script and that works great but AS was (and still is) so simple. Each frame could be called up as a single image on the screen with a list of things relating to that frame. So a particular sound or text or voice, could be hooked to that event. It always worked, was dirt simple to change and the only complaint I ever had with it was when I upgraded to 3.1 with my A4000D. Then it broke.
There was also this ancient program, shareware of course, I think it was German, had a funny name like "M" or some such thing.... but it was similar in set up but the thing that amazed me was not only how each frame could carry various events like sound file start and sound file end... so the sound was stretched over the frames in between, but it could play huge animations very very fast. I tried a multi-hundred frame 2 color anim, just shadows on a white background and it was shooting em on the screen at about 60fps for the smoothest anims. I think Animation Station evolved into Anim Workshop, which I acquired in a garage sale awhile back only to find that it requires a keyfile to run and the company has since folded (of course). So if anybody has said keyfile around I would be exceptionally happy to trade for it.
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amigaoneproductions wrote:
If the hard drive is spinning and being recognised by the OS, then software recovery tools will usually get the job done.
If the drive is not spinning or seen at all, i.e. not even at the lowest level then you have a more serious fault which will probably mean getting out your screwdrivers.
If the PCB is the cause of the fault, which is the most likely - it's the most complicated part of the system, changing it with an IDENTICAL (same revision, same firmware) one will solve your problem.
:-)
I've repaired several harddrives by swapping the drives PCB controller board. Had to watch ebay for 4 months once to find an identical one...
I would guess the most common failure of the PCB (any PCB) would be one of the electrolitic capacitors drying out. Try replacing all the electrolitic capacitors on the PCB board if you can't find an identical one, Try the ones closest to the motor start transistor first, since the drive does not spin up.
Would not open up the drive unless you heard it was making noise before failure!