recovering hard drives information

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Merc]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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!"

[amigaoneproductions]

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 ;-)

[Thomas]

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

[patrik]

@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

[Ilwrath]

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.  :-)

[motrucker]

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.

[Will-i-am]

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

[Oliver]

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.

[BadBigBen]

See:

http://www.hddrecovery.com.au/downloads/200ways.pdf

[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.

:-) :-) :-)

[Will-i-am]

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.

[Oliver]

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.

[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...