Hi all,

I've got a damaged Hitachi Travelstar 100GB 5400RPM (HTS541010G9AT00) laptop drive that suffered a fall. Upon opening, the top read/write head was bent under itself, which subsequently scratched a circle around the top platter. Attached are some photographs. I've ordered an identical drive in an attempt to either swap the platters or swap the head stack, but have never attempted either before.

Can someone give me some advice? Is data recovery within reach for this case?

Thanks


(above) shows the circular scratch caused by the bent head, note, the fingerprints on the platter are not mine, someone else had a go at it before it got to me

(above) the bent head

sorry its almost impossible

Almost impossible? Can you elaborate a bit? Can I not replace the head stack and try a dump of the drive with dd_rescue?

it's not just matter of head stack replacement... and anyway the area affected by the scratch is lost forever. For me it's beyond repair or it could take a lot of time to investigate.

I realise the data in the affected area is lost. However, I'm still interested in trying to get any data that could be in the unaffected areas. What is needed besides replacing the head stack? Could the scratched area damage the new heads?

Yes. Scratched area will damage new heads.

You have a number of technical challenges that make this very difficult, if not impractical:

1. If the scratch is on the Service Area, forget it. (IBM 2.5" drives have SA tracks near the hub. Not 100% sure about Hitachi, but those two companies put out some joint product . . . ) The Service Area contains adaptive data for that particular drive.

2. You'd have to load the heads without letting them touch the bad tracks, or they would instantly self-destruct, and prevent them from seeking during operation to the damaged area. Note that a Hitachi drive will not start if the heads are parked on the platters, so you'd need to defeat that mechanism.

3. You'd also need to decontaminate the platters. No telling what damage the previuous fellow did that you CAN'T see.

I doubt many pros can get data from this drive; your chances would be a very small fraction of theirs. Try it if you want to experiment, but not if you need the data.

Jon

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Thanks Jon for your detailed response. I'm hoping the SA tracks are near the hub, as the scratch is close to the outside of the platter. If anyone knows more about SA track location on Hitachi drives that would be helpful.

By self-destruct do you mean they would be damaged by the scratch or do they have some mechanism for disabling themselves if they detect a bad area? Is it possible to forcibly limit where the heads go, say by introducing a limiter next to the arm? Seems like that might cause more problems than it would solve. I read about an "endstop" in these forums (post46505.html?hilit=endstop#p46505), can someone elaborate on that?

From these forums I've seen a couple of success stories of reading data from scratched drives. So I'm willing to give it a try.

Hitachi says in its site that the head flight less to 0,5um (micron) from the platter. If you could have a look with an electronic microscope (I have some photos but sorry it is copyrighted material) to the scratch zone you could see a "canyon" with borders that are not flat, but higher than the platter "floor". There are also some "rocks" that are material coming from the "canyon". Your new heads, at the first trip on the platter, will crash onto the edge and the rocks. Phisically. There are some tricks to use in some models, but if you are planning to put the heads normally in the park zone and let them pass on the scratch you will have broken heads in seconds.

Well I bought a donor drive on eBay, practiced headswaps on some other drives (two 3.5" 20GB Western Digitals that both failed and one 2.5" 10GB Toshiba that was a success), and finally attempted the headswap on the Hitachi.

What can I say, it didn't work, but I figured I'd follow up here in case it helps someone else.

One thing I noticed was a degradation in the amount the new heads moved around on the scratched platter. The first time I powered up the drive, the heads moved around a lot and appeared to be able to read at least some data because the size of the drive showed up in my syslog (it was attached by USB). However, after trying a few more times, the heads seemed to move around less and less, so I suppose they got progressively more damaged the more I tried.

Thanks everyone for your help.

Keep in mind, that dust from that scratch is probably distributed over all surfaces and could be causing new scratches.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

well a candidate for trash it, that head crash its or over the Servo or SA zone or maybe could be get some data with a MFM or STM Tunneling , or maybe its a black hole !

Best Regards