Hello Forum
I'm currently in a job to get a HGST drive working again so data can be extracted. The heads cannot find the start sectors (high pitched noise), so I received a replacement drive.
Now I have the choice of changing the platers (and readjusting 'em) or change the servoarm.
I worked from '95 -'98 at ontrack for doing sector extraction (all day long) on very old style drive from the present point of view:
-no ramps were used
-platers had mostly still a parking area
-heads were huge compared to today
-tolerance were much higher than today
-electronic was exclusively on the main pcb (compared to the head electronic of today)
-.....

Unluckily most of my old collegues at ontrack were dismissed when Kroll took over, so no more contact to my old league..

Did anyone disassemble such a drive? The ramps can be pretty nasty what I've seen. The exact step-by-step disassembly guidance seems most interesting to me. I've access to an ISO6 clean room (not good, but all I can manage), so what way (Head or plater change) would you go?

Cheers
Sam

It looks like you are over your head. Send to a data recovery professional.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Hi lcoughey
pretty sure I'm as I have not done such a thing for a HD built around 2010. I'm mainly swapping PCBs on dead drives and recovering from BB, RAID logic and FS errors and such small failures. Unluckily that's not my drive (I'm using multiple RAID/SANs to get redundancy for myself) but of a neighbour who want not spent any amount of money.

What way would you go? Just abandoning it seems to easy to give up.

Cheers
Sam

Get a bunch of old cheep hard drives first you can play around with and practice head swapping (there are youtube vids out there to help) once you mastered it then take the chance.

A head swap will be a better choice as a platter swap will be more difficult. If the drive has two platters then forget about moving it. Just the heads assembly.


But as lcoughey said,if the drive is not yours then its best to send it to a data recovery center.

Shane

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions"

How many hours are you prepared to work for your neighbour that doesn't want to spend money? I want a new car but I don't want to spend money. Looks like I don't get that car.

The biggest problem here is that the result your neighbour wants COSTS money. If you take on too many peoples burdens, even if you want to help, and you are a nice guy etc... these burdens then build onto your own. Trust me when I say you do not want to continue to do this.

You have already identified that the job is difficult. My course of action would be to present your neighbour with 2 different DR companies and an explanation that you do not have the tools to do this, or the experience and that continuation will most likely lead to no recovery.

I do have access to Fujitsu and Seagate/Samsung drives (we do destroy them and recycle the materials). The last Fujitsu were I did such a procedure (1 year ago) was a 15k SAS and was perfectly smooth. A month later I did try a Toshiba 7k2 which was completely different in it's details. As I haven't had a HGST in years at my "service" I'm in the same impression that HGST/WD recovers would be best to ask about the instruction (what first, how to ). That's why I started the thread
Cheers and nice holiday
Sam

Luckily I'm out of intentions long years ago. This is much more an exercise for me.
The neighbor came to me because we destroy magnetic storage/media for our living and I didn't agree with him that a head mechanic is in the thousand as the two companies he's already ask (for a charge of course), so he wanted it salvaged (we earn about 30-70ct for the rare earth per plater + a few ct for the aluminium).
For me it's a practice how more modern drives work just to stay in contact and maybe recover the data.



Maybe you had a lot of "do it for free even when the data is valuable for me" customers, which is rare to me. I propagate redundancy (and security) all my working life long (when you grew up or started out with floppies you know what I'm talking about :-] ) and tell that backup is always half the money (of an investment) when not even more.

So nobody had actually the same or similar HGST drive. I have a few HUA 1TB Series to try it, but afaik the Ultrastar are much different (different creating country and creation lab and probability) from the cheaper deskstar series.

Cheers
Sam

While I do agree with Luke that you should hand a job like this off to a professional, I understand that not every job is worth the cost.

I'd recommend head swap over platter exchange any day, especially if there's more than one platter (which I'm assuming it has). Your chance of success platter swapping is about zero. I only platter swap a couple drives a year and only when the motor or bearing are beyond repair. For some drives we even replace the bearing in place rather than platter swap (though it still hardly ever works because they are usually Seagate nightmares). Head swap has much better outcomes.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Hello all
so I was successful, even when the platers were severly damaged due to multiple headcrashes (all four heads were hanging on tits wires only) so the surface was scraped off in concentric circles (I attached a picture of it). The servoarm was mounted from the downside, the headcomb for Seagate B10 or the Fujitsu drives was not at all fitting (so I bought a sortment from HDtools) but the rest was just as in most Fujitsu and SGT drives I know from disassembling. Before I attached the new arm I had to clean the surface from the "pixie dust" (with bottled N2 gas) of the scraped of platers, which forced me a few times to start the cleaning cycle of the clean room and costed me a few times waiting for the room to get ready. I calculated from the scap of/clean area of 10% direct impact and another 15% of side material and magnet contact area. Even with this crude calculation it was nearly as it showed in the read out phase. As lots of area was not there the copy job (ddrecue and ddr_help) had to be started with 1GB offset each time and restarted and with the protocol later getting nearer the damaged areas (the HD logic failed every time when the head come to far into the "not existing anymore area" and obviously lost it's sync and needed a power cycle) to get the most datas out of it. I'm using an SiI based SATA controller where I can control the GPIOs to switch power on/off on a seperated PSU board (to inhibit the power surge). It's quite similar to the PC3000 ISA Board, some might remember.
After I got the 1TB binary dump the logs showed about 27% NUL areas. With that I started my usual job with Quetek Filescavenger, GDB for Runtime, cgsecurity Photrec and last DiscRecovery from O&O, all very prone to media failures. WinHEX would be my natural 1st choice but took much to much time to get results.
I'm pretty sure everyone of you have it's own favourite programm to get results.
With about 15h (by 12h just for the mechanical part) it was a refreshing experience.
Cheers
Sam