HDD committed Seppuku

[SmashOveride]

Greetings all. So before I really try to recover any data from this thing, I thought I would ask for anyone's tactics, techniques, proceedures, and experience.

I'm not expecting to recover much if any data from this thing, but doing it for a family member who has probably a decade of family photos they don't want to lose. I told them this was going to be a Jesus read because if I can extract any data what so ever, it would be by the pure grace of God. As you can see, or at least what my untrained eyes can see is the heads have committed seppuku (Japanese Samurai suicide). Top platter is damaged and I'm sure the underside looks like a crime scene.

I have ordered a donor drive to replace the heads and a comb kit for the swing arms (not sure what that part is called). So after getting it pieced back together, should I run spinrite first? Or is there another option to run first that would be better suited for this kind of catastrophe?

Thanks

 

[jlee]

Absolutely do not run SpinRite on it. SpinRite 6.x is not suited for these kind of data recovery efforts.

If the drive does work after you change out parts, it will probably have a limited lifetime. What you want to do is concentrate on using that limited lifetime recovering the pictures and anything else of importance. First try to copy any pictures you can from the drive. If there are failures in reading the pictures then you can work on recovering only those bad sectors that are part of the data you want to recover.

You'll need some kind of program that lets you only read the specific sectors you want to recover. Once you are trying to recover a bad sector, the only way to recover the data is to tell the drive to read the bad sectors over and over again. It can take tens of thousands of times per bad sector, if not more. At some point you will probably need to decide how much effort you want to put in to reading just one bad sector, given the likely limited lifetime of the drive. Often it's better to just move on and accept the data loss or at least come back to it later after recovering everything else you can.

SpinRite 6.x isn't really suited for this kind of data recovery. It's designed to test the whole drive without caring that some sectors might be more important to you than others. If you know the bad sector numbers you want to recover, you can kind of force it to concentrate on those, but it's a lot of work requiring constant supervision.

 

[peterblaise]

ANY platter damage needs burnishing to eliminate non-data material, allowing read heads to have appropriate access to the remaining data material, surface and depth, such as performed by Gillware https://www.gillware.com/hard-drive-data-recovery/data-recovery-101-burnishing-platters/

Sorry, but occasionally, we spend a lot of money to recover from a lack of duplicate and separate backups.

 

[SmashOveride]

Thanks for the feedback. I told my family that I would give it a try but not to get their hopes up. Burnishing is probably out of the question due to the expected price tag. To bad they are $50K for a used one? Sometimes the hardest lessons are the ones that hurt the most :-(

 

[ShadowMeow]

If the platters are damaged replacing the head stack assembly won't really help. You should find a data recovery professional... www.datarecoveryprofessionals.org

 

[peterblaise]

I have the experience of https://drivesaversdatarecovery.com/ charging $800US to get thousands of irreplaceable world-travel JPGs from a dead-to-BIOS drive, not an outrageous charge in assessment.

If we don't send someone the drive and ask, we'll never know.

Usually, if there's no data recoverable, there's no charge.

Usually if we don't like the price of getting any found data, they 'negotiate' because they want SOMETHING, rather than just us saying forgetaboutit.

Fun exercise swapping head stacks though, good try.

 

[ShadowMeow]

How did the platters get damaged? Have you tried inspecting them with a Green Light?

$300 Data Recovery are the cheapest.