Recent article on HDD Repair.

[DigiHound]

Dear Pretty Much Everyone,

I joined this forum a few weeks ago looking for help in repairing my dead HDD, a Samsung HD103SI. What I didn't talk about then is the fact that I was using my dead HDD to write an article on hard drive repair -- what's possible for a regular person to achieve, and what isn't.

I've http://www.extremetech.com/computing/133294-raising-the-dead-can-a-regular-person-repair-a-damaged-hard-drive and would appreciate any feedback you might give. I apologize in advance if this qualifies as link spam -- I'm hoping it does not. I learned a great deal here, and while I believe I captured the various scenarios accurately, I'd like to make certain. Thanks to those of you who responded to my original thread and gave tips/advice on the best way to proceed.

[harddrivespecialist]

I would advise you to stop playing with that drive and seek for professional help.
Drive sounds really bad.

[hddguy]

There is no data recovery training program, or industry standard fixed prices etc. Each recovery center will determine what the problem is and give you a realistic quote afterwards,

Many firms refuse to publish their prices online, which makes comparisons difficult,

This is because different faults (even the same faults at different levels of failure) can often require varying levels of care and attention. Rather than making comparisons difficult, this actually allows a more suited cost based on the work required for the data recovery.

There are two broad categories of problems that can nuke a drive: PCB issues and internal component failures.

There are at least 4 categories I can think of.

good companies will offer you a free evaluation

This is not always the case. Some smaller firms may offer this as a way of receiving bulk jobs and working only on the simpler cases before outsourcing the rest.

No firm can completely diagnose a hard drive by remote, but that doesn’t mean they can’t get an idea for what’s wrong.

there are so many issues that share the same symptoms that this quote is unrealistic.

your drive is much more likely to develop “unexpected problems” halfway through the recovery process.

Again, this is much more common (legitimately) than you are aware of. Failing disks generally deteriorate more and more over time with the biggest causes being failing heads or degraded media.

Most companies will acquire a compatible donor drive for you as part of the price tag, It may be possible to shave some cash and time off the process if you provide the hardware yourself,

Again, this is wrong. Many repairs require specific parts to be compatible. To determine compatibility certain dependencies need to be met, such as date / location of manufacture, preamp type etc


I once read an article titled "200 ways to revive a dead hard drive". Of all the methods listed, I would not use a single one. The information you write is interesting, but at the same time if a HDD has failed anything other than logically (i.e deleted data) then you 100% need a pro if you want your data to be safe

[DigiHound]

There are at least 4 categories I can think of.

What are they?

I'm still coming up with two. Physical damage to the exterior, like a snapped SATA port, would still count as PCB damage. I'm basically categorizing between the "Stuff inside" and "stuff outside."

I'll make a few updates to address the rest.

[SAjunky]

Get some idea about recovery by reading this:
http://www.chinahdd.cn/hdd/PCI3000%20UDMA/PC3000UDMA%20Manual/SamWin_Net.pdf
You need RS232/LVTTL converter to read error reports from the hard disk.

[labtech]

There are at least 4 categories I can think of.

What are they?

I'm still coming up with two. Physical damage to the exterior, like a snapped SATA port, would still count as PCB damage. I'm basically categorizing between the "Stuff inside" and "stuff outside."

I'll make a few updates to address the rest.

4 quick ones: logical, electronics, firmware, mechanical, etc.

And there are factors that could influence a few of those from either the inside or the outside.

[DigiHound]

"logical, electronics, firmware, mechanical, etc."

All of which are located in one of two places. Either 1) On the PCB or 2) Inside the drive.

If a drive controller contains firmware that fails and it's on the PCB, that's a PCB problem (and not something you can fix without specialized tools). If the firmware was kept inside the drive for some reason, it would be an internal problem and inaccessible without a clean room.

But there's no third category unless you count the connection pins themselves for the disk motor and the drive contacts.

[Vulcan]

If the firmware was kept inside the drive for some reason, it would be an internal problem and inaccessible without a clean room.

That statement is incorrect.

Most modern drives have firmware and related data structures on a reserved area of the platters (the "System Area" - SA) which is typically accessible using vendor-specific (semi-)secret commands via the (S)ATA/SCSI interface (and sometimes via a serial terminal and other more exotic methods). No cleanroom is required for that access. Firmware-related issues (e.g. corruption of the G-list, corrupted module checksums etc.) are a significant proportion of data recovery work.

Therefore, as labtech told you, firmware-related data recovery work is a distinct category, not included in the other three categories that he mentioned.

[jono-ats]

We posted a blog entry awhile ago on the same topic:

http://www.datasaversllc.com/2012/01/03 ... good-idea/

Jon