Hello all!

I am new to this board and am very happy to have found you all here. It is very interesting to see that there might actually exist some hope for a drive that has been damaged, even for a private person, where corporate recovery prices are not an option.

Please accept my apologies if this was an unnecessary post, but I searched the forum without seeing a good answer.

My drive is not spinning up, it is the 500GB 8MB version purchased for OEM (external drive) a couple years ago, and it took a hit when it flew off my desk by accident. The symptom is that the drive does not get recognized in bios, and the motor emits a constant audible noise similar to a beep beep beep sound. As far as I understand, this is due to the fact that the motor is not spinning up.

Is that something that can be recovered? I live in Sweden, and the only people I have found are aurora, and their pricing is prohibitively expensive for this case. (Family and friend photos from the last ten years, and the disk belongs to a student).

I want to open the drive up to try to spin the spindle (obviously without touching heads, platters) to see if it is indeed blocked - although I imagine you guys would say that it is a bad idea. Can I have you guys 2 cents?

Sincerely,

Frodofrodo

Yes it is a bad idea to open the drive in a non-clean environment (ie. not inside a clean room). That alone can cause further problems to your drive, which is already badly damaged as i can assume by what you describe.

Maybe your drive is suffering from spindle lock (ie. platters can't spin). In this case when powered, drive would return a "hummmmm" or a "buzzzz" and drive won't spin up.

In this case, DIY is out of the question. I'm sorry. And platter surface need to be investigated for damage too.

Contact Bosse (mr_spokk) he's in Gotenborg and maybe can help you further. Or i could look at the drive if you don't mind sending it abroad.

But I strongly suggest Bosse, he comes highly recommended.

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Hi, as your drive was dropped I'll can tell you that the bearings inside the drive is bad and dislocated, and it's nothing you can do to fix it by yourself...sorry to say.

Hej, I och med att din disk var tappad i golvet så fick lagren i disken en knäck som gör att disken inte spinner som den skall, och det är tyvärr inget du kan göra själv utan måste lämna den till ett dataräddnings företag som är vana att hantera denna typ av fel.
Hör gärna av dig om du vill att vi skall ta en koll på den.

Regards/ Bosse

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Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

Hi! I'm not sure if I am allowed to post a reply only in swedish, so I'll keep it in english to make sure I dont infringe upon any board rules.

First of all, thank you both for replying so quickly! I am very glad you took the time to read my post.

Second, I thought you guys would say what you did.. I have always thought DIY was out of the question until I started taking apart old failed drives that I didn't care about. I understand that moving the stack to another drive is completely out of the question- misalignment etc, but I was hoping that I could "unstick" the bearing as you sometimes can in less precise bearings...

Don't worry your answers convinced me not to try. However: If the bearings are messed up, then transplant is the only option right? It sounds like that would be way out of my price range so I probably gotta say good bye to the photos. Are prices confidential or could I ask what it might end up costing - worst case? (I can't remember if the disk was on... so lets say transplant stack to another drive because of bearing failure, and contact between arms and disk surface so scratching as well...)

Sincerely,

Frodofrodo

You have PM

Regards/ Bosse

_________________
Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

I will not quote price as i truly believe mr_spokk is your best choice here

_________________
http://www.northwind.gr
SandForce SSD Recovery
Ransomware Reverse Engineering - NoMoreRansom! partners

Agreed. Bosse will be able to sort you out

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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