Recovering data from a broken IBM Travelstar DBCA-206480

[tverbeure]

Hi all,

I bought a piece of test equipment that used a IBM Travelstar to store the firmware. The drive doesn't work correctly anymore and I'd like to try my had a recovering the contents.

Here are the details:

* when you lightly shake the drive, it sounds like something is a bit loose inside.
* a video with how it sounds when powering it on: https://mastodon.social/@tom_verbeure/1 ... 6351904273
* when connected to Windows, it doesn't show up on crystaldiskinfo or HDDscan.
* when connected to linux and doing "dmesg -w" or lsblk, there's no message ever that the OS is seeing something.

I'm thinking of doing a platter swap, but there's some issues there too:

there are multiple models of this drive with identical model number: "DBCA-206480 E182115 T". However, my device lists "13328CYL, 15HEADS, 63SEC/T", 6440MB. Meanwhile, there's a model with identical model number that lists 13424CYL, 15HEADS, 63SEC/T and 6.49GB.

One difference is the MLC indicator: F41941 for mine, F41944 for the one on eBay, if that means anything?

Questions:
* based on what you see in the video, what kind of problem do you think the drive is dealing with?
* if there are mechanical issues with a drive, is it normal that it won't show up at all in Window or Linux? The reason I'm asking: if the controller board itself is broken and the controller board firmware is unique to the drive configuration, then a platter swap to a different drive with different configuration won't work.
* what kind of software could I use to further narrow down the diagnosis?
* what would you do to recover the data on this drive?

Note that I bought this test equipment at auction for $45. It's not a life or death wedding pictures recovery situation that would warrant a great expense. It would just be cool to make it work.

[fzabkar]

This kind of question comes up frequently at https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/. If you tell them your instrument's model number, you may find that someone will have an HDD image for it.

[tverbeure]

This kind of question comes up frequently at https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/. If you tell them your instrument's model number, you may find that someone will have an HDD image for it.

Unfortunately, I’m well past the point of asking EEVblog forum (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/ ... msg5857055).

I’ve tried a disk image from KO4BB, I tried one that was given to me privately after asking on BlueSky, I’ve had someone with a corporate Rohde & Schwarz account file a support ticket, I’ve fired up Ghidra to see if there’s something I can reverse engineer from the software that I have to get me going.

Right now my only remaining options are contacting sellers on eBay and asking them if they’re willing to extract a disk image for some cash or doing a HD rescue.

The latter is more entertaining!