recovering hard drives information

[Hyperspeed]

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.

:-) :-) :-)

[Hyperspeed]

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...

[Hyperspeed]

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...

:-)

[Hyperspeed]

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!

[Hyperspeed]

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).