Edwards said the circuit board on the bottom of the drive was "burned almost beyond recognition" and that all of its components had fallen off. Every piece of plastic on the model ST9385AG hard drive melted, he noted, and all the electronic chips inside had burned and come loose.

Edwards said the Seagate hard drive -- which was about eight years old in 2003 -- featured much greater fault tolerance and durability than current hard drives of similar capacity.

Two other hard drives aboard the Columbia were so severely damaged that it was impossible to extract any usable data, he added.

Before recovery could begin, a great deal of dirt and other debris had to be cleaned from the storage device. A rubber seal at the top of the hard drive was completely burned off enabling dirt and charred elements to enter the casing. Everything but the drive's platters were virtually unusable, remarked Edwards

"The heads were bent and they were touching where they shouldn't have, so we had to carefully cut and bend metal away from the platters to get them out without causing more damage," said Edwards.

Once cleaned, the platters were placed into a spare drive and carefully aligned with a new motor. Because the original circuit board was destroyed, Kroll had to use trial and error to determine which firmware was needed for the device.

Although damage to the drive worsened once the team got it up and running, the data recovery specialists retrieved 99% of the drive's DOS-formatted contents. "It was only a couple hundred megabytes of data, which isn't much by today's terms, but the data [the drive] contained was very valuable," noted Edwards.

Hi Mind Merge

Hot swap is not easy in these drives, already tried and no result.
Most of the drive are fully latest which is not fully supported by tools. HEAD map in ram also not support by PC-3K , SEDIV, MRT.

Many many thing are not supported.
I have SA Backup of 4 drives out of 5. and backup SA is very difficult.

These drive works fine when i block read channel, and gives me access to SA. other wise start clicking after calibration due to plate 3 bad.

WE are trying to add some function in sediv to make head map in ram. and then cloned the remaining good platters which are 0 1 2. then try to clean 3rd number.
With Head 0123 hdd clicking, and for run the drive with head map 012 we need head map in ram, its the only way.

very very hard case of my life. gives a head ache.
well trying, will update if i get any success.


Regards
Waqas Ali
http://www.sediv.net
http://www.datamagicme.com