Dropped hard drive...

[Jidis]

Well, last weekend, I think I had about the worst computer experience imaginable. I snagged the power cable for an external USB drive with my foot as I was leaving the desk, pulling the drive off the top of the computer, and landing it on the floor, most likely while it was active. It immediately becomes "unrecognized" and begins making a shuffling sound, which I imagine now was a head scraping across some new gashes in the platter at 7200rpms.

For many years now I had been dragging around three 40 gig drives in caddies and using external bays on three different machines at home and the studio. I had finally gotten wise and moved to something hot-swappable and less "clunky", equipping the three machines with USB2 cards and copying all my data to an external. For the past couple months, all current activity and saves happened on the new external.

After gradually realizing that nothing was going to revive the damaged drive over a couple days, the feeling was indescribable. The more I thought about the folders, the more stuff I remembered was on there, Nuendo sessions, Ghost images of "clean states" for my machines, hundreds of megs of photos, websites and hours of downloaded info and PDFs, and of course, MIOS/MB projects, including the panel layouts for a controller I started a few months ago.

On the bright side, I discovered yesterday that three weeks worth of recent studio pictures from a place I had been in for the past six years, were also on one of the removable caddy drives in a folder called "safe".

I hope nobody here even needs to be warned about doing something that foolish with their data. I've had more drives fail than I can remember over the years, but somehow I've grown accustomed to having them warn me a little in advance. This one happened in less than a second.

Sorry for the long-ass self-pitying sob story. I guess I earned every bit of it.

George 

[SLP]

yeah... that sucks.... my internal hdd broke some months ago (hitachi)... and I had -all- my stuff on it.

there were just very few backup CDs.  that was shocking...

[pay_c]

I fully understand that, most regret from my side for something like this!

I nearly ran into the same problem, but went out pretty (much) lucky: I wanted to sell my old studio PC and  buy a new one and so I started to backup everything. About at 80% of safing stuff the HDD (IBM one) started making funny sounds (that searching sound all the time) and the read time went up like hell. Half an hour later the PC hang up and did not boot anymore. Even formatting the HDD didn´t work anymore, it was so much of dead. I still miss some minor files due to this one, but as I said, 80% are there. Lucky me indeed.

Since then I have a backup HDD all the time (external HDD) and backup *the whole* computer about every half year. I do that overnight so it´s not stressy at all and I really do think it´s worth the effort. You do not know what you will miss until you really loose it. (sounds like a girlfriend but is actually about HDDs).

So again, Jidis, most sorry for this! Loosing all that stuff sucks sooo dammit much!

/edit: Just as a remark. After all that story I informed myself about good (or better) HDDs. Samsung turns out to be some good manufacturer (*actually* - unfortunately this fact turns out to change every few years and somebody else is better again). I have some HDD from them now and it´s the most silent drive I ever had up to now. Hopefully it fullfills the expectation to run a little longer and more reliable.

[DavidBanner]

comiserations there mate - we've all been there

and I've definately got data I've lost that I miss more than any ex-girlfriend....

[Jidis]

After all that story I informed myself about good (or better) HDDs.

I worry that doing that isn't 100% safe either. I think I've had just about every common brand of drive croak on me at some point (usually going into "click mode" first). I've had to RMA two or three WDs and then was reading that they were recommended as one of the most reliables among some audio people in the Steinberg forums a generation or two later. I think it changes from line to line, but maybe even from one batch to the next. Two of the removables I used to use were IBM Deskstars and I had thrown them around like my car keys for years and they still work, but then I had one internal in my Mac which looked just like them, and it died within a few months.

I think my main problem with the backups is that I need a better system of sorting (or just taking the time to do so). When I head out at night, I tend to drag all the saved and downloaded junk from my desk or whatever straight into the root of the external or removable I carry with me. If it went into a nice neat folder hierarchy until it built up to DVD size, I'd probably have had it all safely burned off, but I make such a mess that I'm never ready to save.

I've misplaced my 128M USB flash drive too, but there was nothing on it. I'm thinking of grabbing a big one of those at least for carrying copies of the smaller important stuff like MIOS apps and layouts. There's a lot to be said for media with no moving parts. I actually went inside that dropped drive, and it has a circular gash going about 80% of the way around the platter. The head is supposed to skim along the surface, floating over it by like a thousandth of an inch or something ridiculous. Knowing that now, I'm afraid to even breathe too hard around an active drive.

Thanks all for the sympathies. Not everybody understands that sort of thing. My mother actually yelled at me when I told her about it, because there were two or three grandchildren pictures on the drive (they only have about a thousand other ones).

Take care,

George

[Sasha]

I think my main problem with the backups is that I need a better system of sorting (or just taking the time to do so). When I head out at night, I tend to drag all the saved and downloaded junk from my desk or whatever straight into the root of the external or removable I carry with me. If it went into a nice neat folder hierarchy until it built up to DVD size, I'd probably have had it all safely burned off, but I make such a mess that I'm never ready to save.

George, I truly understand how you feel, and reading this I can recall that bad feeling about it. As David said, I  miss some data more than any ex-girlfriend. It is lost without return.

I also have problem with backups like you. Compiling full DVD is a big problem for me. I like order and to fill DVD with mp3 for example is nightmare, only because I like my music to have ID3 tags and folders to be tidy. It takes time, and most of all everyday DISCIPLINE! No discipline over here  :P The lost of music is not a problem, it can be find again but I lost much of precious, personal data, from audio, graphics to other kind of creative projects which cannot ever  recovered. You think I backup regularly now... well, no. I have few GB of free space now on 120GB HDD and I had  few on 30GB HDD. So, as much as I have, more I download, hence more messy it becomes. I also bought 1 GB flash for only "necessary things" for dragging around which is always full.  ::) And when I check to delete some files, seams I need everything.

I`ve seen some BBC program about data lost some time ago, and there was people that had nerve brake down because of that... they lost big business projects. My friend cried like a baby after she had a HDD crash. It can be devastating experience. I hardly recovered myself.

I learned that quality of disk really don`t matters that much for not losing the data. I had some cheap internal HDD that I dragged in my belt bag every day while driving the bicycle for 15-20km in the time of NATO bombing. I must say the ride was pretty ruff! :) ...and it worked great all the time, but I had a crash of much expensive one that I never took out of PC.

I think, if you want your data to be safe you must back up regularly, and If some data means very much to you, backup twice! Discipline it the word. Good luck George and take care ;)

[stryd_one]

Wow that totally sucks, my sympathies dude. Given that the drive is toasted, I'd get a screwdriver and open it up and see if you can fix it mechanically. I know what you're thinking, that will never work, but my friend Flownezz did it once and it worked. You've got nothing to lose.

And people learn this: When it comes to data If it doesn't exist in three places, it does not exist!

I just wanna find a nice bit of software that will sync up directories on separate machines/drives easily. We use rsync and/or dataprotector at work but they're ugly and expensive respectively...

What sasha just said is a total echo of my situation....

And hey don't feel bad, a big multinational I support had something similar last week... of course the tapes had been degaussed by the courier as well. A few thousands later and it was in a lab in the states getting rebuilt....

[Therezin]

If you've not already taken it apart, i'd be inclined not to - there are companies who can take the platters from your damaged disk and recover as much data as they can from it, and they need to do it in a clean room - the slightest speck of dust can kill a drive. We had a similar problem at work - it cost like £500, but we got a fair amount of data back...

[DavidBanner]

not to mention they need to do it in a vaccum

[stryd_one]

Yeh well obviously if you want to spend a mint you take it to a pro like I mentioned at the end... but you don't *need* to do it in a vacuum, as flownezz demonstrated to me and proved me wrong when I said the same thing (actually I said a 'clean room') :)

If you have access to a datacentre that might be better than you shed of course hehehe

[Jidis]

Stryd,

Yeah, I already opened it on the second day or something, after trying everything else and reading about what the specific noises it was making indicated. One of the big hardware sites had an article about it, where they not only open the drive, but they swap head assemblies or something. It looked scary as hell, and expensive, and the bottom line was that even *if* it worked, the drive was not to be trusted for long afterward. This was for when there was a failure of the head mechanism itself. Everything I read seemed to imply that in a case like mine, where the platter was already damaged, you were SOL unless you had five or ten grand to have it sent somewhere to be read by alternate means.

I too got to thinking about folder sync software after all this, but I think the obvious solution is just better backup practices alltogether. There's really no excuse for me having 130+ gigs of junk all in one vulnerable place like that. I probably only really needed to be carrying a small fraction of it around with me.

@Sasha- That's exactly how I am with the permanent back ups. I figure if it isn't perfectly sorted for archival, I'll have to do it again later. Now look where it got me. :-[

I will say I was really happy to find the second copy of my studio pictures. I had been in that place for about six years, so they were about all I had to remember it by, plus before I disassembled everything, I had to get all the junk out, so the rooms were actually clean for the first time in years. ;D

George

PS- To add some humor to the otherwise depressing tragedy: I scored a good deal on a used 1.5GHz laptop last week, which was listed as "needing to stay plugged in". I figured that meant dead battery, but to my surprise it turns out the kid had tripped over the cord, breaking the DC jack and had wired the power cord directly to the wires inside, along with a homemade duct tape strain relief. Must have done the same thing to the RJ45 jack, as half of it was missing. After fixing it, I was bragging about the deal to my sister and mentioned how many "abused" laptops there would soon be, with all the kids dragging them around, knocking them off desks and tripping over their cords. I killed the drive literally ten minutes later. 8) 

[ilmenator]

Stryd,

you might want to look at GoodSync: I found that it is money well spent, I have two licenses and use a fast 2GB USB stick to transfer data between my home and my work PC. That's three places... (knock on wood).

Best regards, ilmenator

[audiocommander]

yeh, what a pitty.

I usually copy all my important stuff to a second HD, burn DVDs often and additionaly store my most important files on my gmx online storage drive (just in case my house burns down... that can happen too!)

the german GMX freemailer has a 1 GB online storage for all accounts ;)

and googlemail is also nice to keep some data, although this is of course not very secure for private data; I'd not trust this v much even with encrypted attachments

Cheers,

Michael

[stryd_one]

Thx Illy :) I'll check it out ...

[Sasha]

I usually copy all my important stuff to a second HD, burn DVDs often and additionaly store my most important files on my gmx online storage drive (just in case my house burns down... that can happen too!)

Michael, you are true example for all of us.  ;)

I read somewhere about service for storing files on some backup satellite which is paranoia step beyond. :) I don`t think makes much sense but good marketing idea if you want to charge data super security. Companies that lost big money with their lost data wont risk again and would probably pay some extra money to think their data are even not affected by nature disasters. I think it is better idea to have backup space in different continents.

Once I managed to save my data from dead HDD pretty easy. One chip burned, and I couldn`t find service to repair it so I decided to take whole PCB from other, smaller one, also Quantum HDD, similar PCB but not the same, and put on my broken HDD. I conect the HDD and was able to see and copy all data.  :D What happiness! The chips was more hot than seamed right, but I didn`t destroy it.  :)

[stryd_one]

Once I managed to save my data from dead HDD pretty easy. One chip burned, and I couldn`t find service to repair it so I decided to take whole PCB from other, smaller one, also Quantum HDD, similar PCB but not the same, and put on my broken HDD. I conect the HDD and was able to see and copy all data.  :D What happiness! The chips was more hot than seamed right, but I didn`t destroy it.  :)

I've done that too :D I was like "holy crap it actually worked!!!" heheheheheh

[MRE]

This is why I keep my external bays on the floor  ;)

Im sorry I was late in seeing this, but I have had MANY successes in recovoring drives from the dreaded click start..  here is the general procedure:

1: buy a replacement drive..

you will only 'get it back once'  so you need somewhere to immediately back it up too.

2: listen to the boot sound. 

the often described 'click state' is a common 'droped drive' failure. Essentially what is happening is one or more of the drive heads has come out of alignment and will no longer park in the head lock mechanism (it is actually clacking into the park slot, rather than slide inside). The drive will not allow reads (and thus boot) if the head is unparked during power up (it wont even spin up). So, it attempts several times to park the head before spinning up the platters (that way, if the platter gets scratched it is only a sector or two and not the whole platter in the spiral circle of death).

3: Prepare your work system.

If this was your boot drive, you need to build up a completely working (booting) system, along with the required data space to back up what you want.

4: Plan ahead.

Remember your drive structure, and what you want to save first.. prioritize what you will save in case you cant get it all.. For instance, go after the "My documents" folder first.. followed by photos, then large file size data like MP3s and video.

5: open the dead drive cover.

Find a CLEAN area to work in. If possible, get some latex gloves. They are not mandatory, but a little extra precaution doesnt hurt. NEVER touch the platter!!!!

The idea that you need a vacume state or a clean room is rediculous.. those are selling points of the data recovery 'specialists.'  There really isnt anything special about it.

Platter swapping is an easy job too but beyond the scope of the home user simply because A: you need a large stock of exact model drives to swap the platter into, and B: you need special screwdrivers and an alignment tool.

You dont always need fancy screw drivers either, but a good set of precision drivers comes in handy. Dont Pry on the cover, you need it. Feel under labels for screws you may have missed.

6: general Inspection

95 percent of the time you will see the head sitting out over the platter.. this confirms your problem. Carefully inspect the the top platter. In fact, its the only one you CAN inspect. check for scratches or obvious damage. Also, when the cover comes off, you might find a small piece fall out.. this is part of the head lock mechanism. Watch for it.. and take the time to figure out how it goes back on. It just sort of sits there, so it likely wont stay in place as you play with the drive, but it needs to be in place when the cover goes back on.

7: move the head

The opposite end of the head sits away from the platter. It is usually isolated from the rest of the drive, as the strong magnets are there. We are looking at the end of the arm opposite of the head..

from this end, carefully and slowly rock the head arm away from the platter, till it is on the edge of the platter. NEVER move the arm on the using the side of the pivot close to the platter.. the big chunky massive end where the magnets are is not going to bend under your fat sausage fingers ;)

Now, with a bright light shining gown, watch as many heads as you can as you rock the heads off the platter.

One or more may 'fall off' or 'snap off' the platter. These are your missaligned heads.

If you are unlucky, you will have one or more. Unfortunately, there isnt much you can do to fix the problem. The precision needed to realign is impossible from home. Any data on the associated surface will be suspect or not available at all.

If you are lucky though (and this is often the case) the heads fly just fine on the platter and never touch. If this is the case, you will be able to recover nearly all your data.

8: park it

The head lock is a plastic piece that holds all of the heads in little slots. Often this is the only real failure of the drive.. some part is either broken or misalligned. Fortunately, all the drive knows about the head position is from feedback on the magnet, and one small mechism that latches.

So, you can take one of two courses of action: Destructive or nondestructive. TRY nondestructive first.

Non destructive:

Simply place the head back into the lock cradle and replace the mechanical latch so that the head is 'locked.'  you may need to help one or more heads into the cradle if it is misaligned. That is afterall the reason the drive failed. It couldnt push the head back into place.

Manually test the release to make sure they heads fall out smooth and slip over the platter without crashing. again, you cant help it much if it scrapes a platter.

Assuming it all looks good, re-park the head, replace any part of the mechanism that latches the head down (often this is a piece that falls out when the cover is removed but usually easy to figure out where it goes), and put the cover back on.

Destructive:

Remove the head park slots so that the head will float in open air where it should be parked. The feedback from the magnet coils 'should' assume the drive is parked but I cant verify this is true on every drive. If you are going to do it this way, you need to place the head, put the cover back, and connect and run the drive WITHOUT MOVING IT... thats sort of a tall order. Have your system in place, with cables pluged in. Leave the drive on the desk face up.

9: back it up

Ok, so you have the drive back together.  You now have one shot (not exactly that bad, but we will get to that ;)

Plug it into a working system.

A note: your system needs to be a fast booting machine, Not one that runs 300 extensions and virus scanners and whatever else. You are going to run the drive as a slave device. YOU MUST NOT ALLOW IT TO HAVE TIME TO GO INTO SLEEP MODE. Keep the drive active.  The faster you can get into 'my computer' and backing up data, the better.

so you boot up... now is the day of recconing..  if it shows up in my computer you are golden. Get in there and start copying as much as you can.

Remember, if the drive is left inactive, it will attempt to sleep..sleep mode means it wants to park.. as soon as it realizes It cant park, it will call it dead, and you have to start from the beginning.

If you get it working and see the drive, test a file.. read a text file or something from my documents.. or copy one file.. 

If this works, then you can repeat the whole procedure several times if need be to get all of the data you need. Just dont cause any NEW damage.

Example: one platter has a scratch.. a few files will not read.. half way through backing up data.. so it hangs and crashes. Well, just perform the procedure again. Now, forget about those files, they are gone.  Move on to the next chunk.

Success stories:

I performed this on a droped laptop size drive from my Creative mp3 player. The player could find any song and play it, but about half way through the song the drive went to sleep and it died.. I did the procedure again and this time backed up the entire drive by connecting the player to my desktop machine via usb and reading all of my songs out.

I performed this on a friends laptop drive. In this case, I actually reinstalled the bootable drive into the laptop, and booted from the supposedly dead drive. I then immediately backed up all the data to an external full size drive. On reboot the drive continued to work fine, until the machine was left for a few minutes doing nothing (the drive was not completely power cycled, so it never made an attempt to park, thus it didnt 'fail' until it was unattended and attempted to sleep the drive). We installed a new laptop drive then copied the data back from the external bay.

I did this twice on dead desktop drives but in both cases the platters were damaged and some files were corrupt, as well as some filenames being really strange..  75-85 percent data recovery. But, these drives had also suffered heat damage.

Note in all cases, the damaged drives could all perform normally untill the drive went to sleep or was completely power cycled. In almost all cases, the drive will survive multiple 'operations.'

So, if you get part way through data recovery, you can try to perform the job again and get the next chunk of data.

Hope this helps.

and hey, in your mind, the data is gone.. so.. why not try it?

[MRE]

DRS guys maintain an inventory of drives from nearly every make and model with the platters removed. They simply put your good parts (platters) into their core, or put a good part from their core (board) temporarily onto yours.

Dead drives fall into 4 catagories:

Drop click

they do exactly what I just told you, and charge an arm and a leg.

Bad board

As exampled by Stryder and Sasha.

The DRS swaps the board from either an identical model or one deamed 'similar enough' by the drive manufacturer and then back it up. this by far the easiest job.

bad Motor/mechanical (heat damage)

DRS swaps the platters into their identical or similar enough drive.. Can be accomplished with nothing more than a set of special driver bits, a simple alignment tool, and a hair net ;)

Crash or 'death spiral'

not much can be done for the scratched data paths but most of the other data is still recoverable. Swap the platters. One or more heads may need to be swapped as well. Collision with the platter often destroys the head.

Most solutions involve swapping the platter. If the heads are out of alignment it is a bit easier to put the platters into a good drive then it is to replace/realign the bad heads. You usually have to remove the platters anyway to safely get the head out, but the platter can come out without touching the head. The more platters the drive has the more complex head removal becomes.

If anyone has worked for a DRS I'd like to know if I have any of this incorrect.

[Jidis]

MRE,

Man thanks for all the great info! That's much better than what I got when I was Googling in desperation. :(

I have already opened the drive and looked around, but may try my luck again later just for the hell of it. The head does have the ability to move, but you can literally see it running into the "bump" in the platter that it caused, as it attempts to ride outward. At that point, you hear a horrible scraping noise and it now has sort of a "C" shaped scratch in the platter from it. I'm pretty sure it didn't look that bad when I first started messing with it, so it's possible that the head was causing more damage the whole time I ran it. I have a feeling at this point that nothing is going to make it safely over that new groove.

BTW- One of the few sites I found suggesting digging around inside an HD was this:

http://www.overclockers.com/tips1035/

The pictures are pretty bad though. IIRC, he completely removes a head assembly in there and warns that you need to rig something up before letting the heads leave the platter area, or they'll smack together and be destroyed.

Again, thanks a bunch for the info. Got it saved here and on my carry drive. Should be burning it off to a "real" disk along with some websites and stuff over the next day.

Take Care,

George 

[NorthernLightX]

George, does your HDD have more than 1 platter? If so, trying to recover data might actually be fruitful for the platters that do not look like a skating-track.

Your horrorstory did actually made me spend more than 500 euro's on a 500GB RAID NAS unit. I asked myself the question "In case of total data loss, would that amount of money make up for it?" and that would be a negative...

[Jidis]

George, does your HDD have more than 1 platter?

No (I think ;D). I was surprised to see what looked like one really thick platter inside it. I wasn't paying close attention when I briefly peeked inside the first time, but I *think* it just had some little speck-like nicks in the platter. I guess they sort of turned into that groove, but it was making the "sssshhishing" sound from right after the drop, like the heads were skimming across the platter. There probably was some sort of tiny protrusion caught under the head that was scratching it. I never did find any of the aforementioned "debris" inside. ???

BTW- The drive is right here. It's a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 (ST3160212A) 160Gig. It was in a SimpleTech external USB2.0 enclosure.

George

PS- From the moment this occurred, I have not once considered that it was anyone/anything's fault but my own. It was a really stupid thing to do, having that much small important stuff in one fragile place with DVD/CD media being as cheap as it is. Glad it made you or any others here think about it though. I'd hate to see anyone else fall into that. Like I said, that "instantaneous death" was not something I had ever experienced or prepared for here.

[cimo]

MTE..

tomorrow my damaged iPod s drive is up for repairing, there is nothing really i want to retrive from it but it can be funny to learn how to deal with broken HDs

Jidis..

i had the same problem some years ago and all my music projects were lost.. well it made me think of the uncertainty of life itself and that we all have to start making funny noise and some day.. die.It also made me understand that most of those projects  were useless c++p (far from me meaning yours were) so i started new ones and they are still c++p but better and more fresh c++p

see in your data loss a message from the holy digital that it was time for you to enter a new dimension, pick up your camera the world is still out there and your mother s little nephews are waiting for you, push Nuendo over the limit, download the latest MB64E application, don t look back... or better .. don t look back-up.

Simone

[MRE]

you can very likely recover some or most of the data....

you could try bending the head arm up a bit..  risky since if you bend it too high it wont read the platter..  and If the MBR is on that surface, it will never find it, and call yet another drive failure..

but then, were also talking about micrometers.. so... it might take very little 'bending' to get it back in place??

Anyway, good luck.