Recovering 2.5" Hitachi 120Gb SATA Drive Data

[toaster]

Hi,

My daughter-in-law's laptop died recently and it was clearly the drive that had gone faulty. No reason to believe any physical damage - she says it just stopped working (she has been working in Africa though so it may well have got pretty hot). She has a few years of stuff on there photos, baby videos, music and some work docs that she would really not want to lose but, as a teacher, her budget is more or less zero (well up to $200).

I whipped the drive out and tried to access it via a USB adapter and also by plugging into my PC's DATA controller - no dice, neither the OS nor BIOS will see it is there. Physically when using teh USB adapter I can hear/feel the drive spin up and do some seeking but it will stop after about 15s. It does sometime seem to stop with a slightly louder [single] click like the roto arm resetting (?). I called a few places and sent it off to a company who had advertised a service here in the UK for between $150-$300. They looked at it and then quoted $1000 and wanted $40 just to return the drive if I didn't go ahead. I have no idea if they were kosher but there is no way she could afford that sum. I was a little dissuaded as they reported the drive as being:

1. Head seizure; read/write head crash; extensive logical data errors; partition damage; SMART log bad; firmware corrupt, hard drive inaccessible;

To me, if the head has seized etc how could they determine any of the other possible issues?

Anyway, given I've told her to assume that her data is lost, she has nothing to lose and I am going to have a bash myself I've pored over a bunch of sites and Scott Moulton's excellent youtube presentations and whitepapers. While I've not done this stuff before I'm reasonably happy to start messing with low-level stuff. I wanted to run my plan past those more knowledgeabel here to give myself the best chance of success:

1) I tried chilling the drive and mounting it but to no avail

2) I've sourced an identical drive from ebay - it isn't the exact same month (JUL07 vs FEB07) - the boards are very similar but have very minor differences. Not ideal I know.

3) I plan to try to fire up a linux system with ddrescue at hand just in case it can see the drive without any mechanical intervention and take an image

4) if that fails I would try a live board swap as it seems like it is relatively risk-free and easy

5) if that fails I would try a platter swap to take the physical media out of the duff drive and transplant it into the ebay one. I've not opened up the duff drive to see if there's any physical damage to the platter or heads but that would be my first opportunity.

6) if that fails I've probably been defeated and she has definbitely learnt the hard way that she should do backups!

Any other tips for possible courses of action? Anyone in SE UK up for lending me a hand for the price of a couple of good curries?

All input appreciated!

Cheers,
T

3) Next if that doesn't work is

[pcimage]

Replacement PCB/hot swapping won't work for this series.

Freezing will not help(as you've found out)

Platter swapping is unnecessary and pointless, unless the motor is seized (which it isn't as it spins).

It's probably bad heads, which I would say is not a DIY option.

$200 is IMHO an unachievable budget for a case like this, but $400 may well be acheivable.

If that is out of the question for now, then I respectfully suggest that the drive is put away until the funds are available. By trying DIY you will almost certainly make the job 10x more expensive or impossible for future recovery.

Your call of course, but these are the facts as I'm sure the other pros on here will agree with.

[toaster]

Thanks for that speedy response - I take it all on board and had in fact been reading some of the posts on this forum which kind of made me realise the board thing was a non-starter

I had a few typos in my original which included that the quote I had had was £1000 and not $1000 It certainly seems like a business sector where there are all sorts - I have a much better appreciation of the complexity now but also a strong wariness about some of the dody outfits that seem to be around - esp those spending good money on the adwords campaigns [I had originally picked and spoken to one bunch, had the drive packed and ready to send, when a little voice in my head suggested I google customer reviews for them - ooerr!]

I take your point on budget - I'll talk to her about it and see, I would like to help her out as I know the stuff she will have lost has great sentimental value but she's already pretty skint so I'd probably have to dip into my own pocket (which in hindsight might have been better than buying extra drives and torx sets on ebay!).

Cheers,
T

[drc]

That diagnostic report reads like a list of all the possible failures of a hard drive...

I agree that it is most probably the heads and that DIY will not really work for that. I would suggest letting Sean (pcimage) have a look at it; he has a great reputation and if nothing else will give you a real idea of what is wrong with it and how much it will cost.

[toaster]

Thanks - I may very well just do that. Certainly it sounds like it would be a waste of time trying DIY. However I have to ask mainly out of sheer curiosity, if the heads are on the actuator arm and this is independent of the PCB - is it not possible to just transplant this?

Anyway I will talk to my DIL and see how much value she really places on her files

Cheers,
T

[toaster]

Just wanted to say a huge thank you to Sean at PcImage (pcimage on here) who has managed to perform a recovery on this disk (turned out to be a couple of duff heads AFAIAA) and for a lot less than the silly quote I had been given by "the other lot"... Great communication start to finish and clearly knows his stuff - well done!

Mark (also very glad I didn't try the DIY option myself)

[Alexii]

Grats and good job PCimage =)

PS now to put an old debate to rest. The drive was frozen, you recovered it. Something tells me there was no dew on the platters when u opened the drive up =)

[pcimage]

Didn't see any dew

H0,1 were good in the drive and H2,3 were bad.

Cloned using H0,1 then after head replacement H2,3 imaged. 100% image of drive obtained.

[fzabkar]

If you read Seagate's product manuals, you would expect that freezing should do no harm. For example, here is a section from the Barracuda 7200.12 manual:

2.8.1 Ambient temperature

Operating: 0° to 60°C (32° to 140°F)
Nonoperating: –40° to 70°C (–40° to 158°F)