Recovering data from drives with media damage - Paper

[jono-ats]

Attached is a draft of an article I wrote to help customers better understand the challenges and outcomes of recovery from a drive with media damage, as might happen after a drive is dropped.

Jon

Attachments

Media Damage and Hard Drive Recovery.pdf

(655.76 KiB) Downloaded 1578 times

[labtech]

Flows nicely. Love it when complex technologies are explained in a simple manner.

[HaQue]

Thats a great idea, are you thinking of giving permission for people like me that dont do internal repairs to show customers the type of thing that could be inside their drive, and why they should take it to a pro?

Weld done, it is very easy to understand without going over the top.

cheers

[jono-ats]

Thanks for the kind words and input.

I'll make the final version available to anyone. I'm collecting edits now.

Jon

[Doomer]

Very nice article, Jon

[mr_spokk]

Very nice, should be put as a "sticky"

[digitalferret]

Fab work Jon, i like that a lot. +1 sticky. & #kudos

Should be mandatory reading for IT techs that fancy battering drives for hours with Spinrite, or peeking inside, before sending it on to a DR co.

The other analogy i like is the head v platter one.
Went something like
The head moving across the platter can be likened to a fast jet doing Mach4, a centimeter off the ground, counting blades of grass as it goes
from memory, forgive errors/omissions etc

Dying drive?
the aircraft now maybe has a ploughed field to contend with, not grass, and the pilot has had a whisky or two.

Kern

[Vulcan]

Should be mandatory reading for IT techs that fancy battering drives for hours with Spinrite

Agreed!

<rant> As I see it, the problem we have is that just occasionally, the repeated reading from Spinrite will "work" to make an unreadable sector become readable again (even though other approaches would also have worked better and been less risky!), so using that high-risk utility is seen as "good" by some, and those occasional successes prevent anyone from saying that it never works, so it's folklore continues. What users neglect to mention are the times when it makes a situation much worse, or totally unrecoverable, because they may not realise that the drive wasn't unrecoverable to begin with - it was Spinrite (or HDDRegenerator etc.) which made it that way! *sigh* </rant>

[TerraNova]

Good article Jon, well done.

[Cleanroom]

Good write up Jono.

[fzabkar]

The other analogy i like is the head v platter one.
Went something like
The head moving across the platter can be likened to a fast jet doing Mach4, a centimeter off the ground, counting blades of grass as it goes :)

ftp://ftp.seagate.com/techsuppt/misc/jet.txt (10/11/99)

"The incredible feat of a read/write head: Today's new generation of disc
drives achieve the engineering equivalent of a Boeing 747 flying at MACH 4
just two meters above the ground, counting each blade of grass as it flies
over. The read/write head floats at 12 millionths of an inch above the
surface of the disc which is turning at 3,600 revolutions per minute.
Read/write heads position precisely over information tracks which are 800
millionths of an inch apart and the data is electronically recorded at
20,000 bits per inch."

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[fzabkar]

Should be mandatory reading for IT techs that fancy battering drives for hours with Spinrite

Agreed!

Ditto. Excellent article.

<rant> As I see it, the problem we have is that just occasionally, the repeated reading from Spinrite will "work" to make an unreadable sector become readable again (even though other approaches would also have worked better and been less risky!), so using that high-risk utility is seen as "good" by some, and those occasional successes prevent anyone from saying that it never works, so it's folklore continues. :( What users neglect to mention are the times when it makes a situation much worse, or totally unrecoverable, because they may not realise that the drive wasn't unrecoverable to begin with - it was Spinrite (or HDDRegenerator etc.) which made it that way! *sigh* </rant>

I expect that SpinRite and HDDRegenerator may be suitable for SSDs. What do people think?

[fzabkar]

The other analogy i like is the head v platter one.

For those drives with glass platters that become transparent after a "cascading failure" ...

"On a clear disc you can seek forever."

[jono-ats]

That's a great quote, to be sure. I'd feel a bit "guilty" appropriating it, even with proper attribution.

[raven4d]

Thank you very much for such idea and article

[northwind]

Nice article Yianni