From: Cheyenne Robert Alspach
Here are some drive recovery tricks that have worked for me, in the order that I do them. Try booting the drive and copying the data off after every step.
- Hold the drive upside down, making gravity change the head geometry ever so slightly. Vertical is also another option.
- Slightly rap the drive with your knuckle, (but nowhere near hard enough to damage the drive).
- Try the drive in another machine, (slight drive voltage change assumed to be the miracle worker here).
- Rap the drive just SLIGHTLY harder than you did above in 2.
- Freeze the hard drive in the freezer for two hours, and place in a plastic zip lock bag to prevent condensation from forming on the drive when you plug it back into the system, (head geometry, electrical resistance lowered, electrical contact points adjusted, etc., assumed to be the miracle here).
- After the drive warms up to room temperature or better, rap it even harder with your knuckle this time.
- Repeat all of above steps on next day, as sometimes I've gotten data off drive simply by trying again.
Hard Drive Recovery Tip From: James McLaughlin
Hmmm sounds like a toughy to me. Back in the old days when I first started teching, if we ran into a problem like this, there were only a few ways to deal with it. I will go over these options now:
QUESTION: What do you think you can do about this, Mr. Tech?
First Answe r Nothing, your computer is too old, and the data on there is not really of that much importance. If you really want it back, you can get a hold of a company called "Total Recall" out of Denver and get charged thousands of dollars to get your files back. Besides, with Y2K, this machine ain't gonna run anyway, and prices are so low right now, there is no reason why you should not upgrade now.
2) Well, I can take it back to the shop and pretend like I know what I am doing for 3-6 hours. Then I will call you the for the next week and a half giving you excuses as to why I am not able to get your information off of that hard drive. Of course, I won't charge you anything, but I will expect compensation for all the time I wasted on your hard drive.
3) I could take the hard drive out of your machine, plug into my Secondary IDE controller, and boot up. Hopefully, I can see your hard drive and have the ability to copy all of your files to a temp folder on my machine called "Your Name." After I collect all information, I would run IBM's WIPE on the drive and then a thorough scandisk, just to see if the cause was sunspot related or not. If......this was not working, then extreme temperatures always have a way of talking older hard drives into giving us what we want. I would then wrap the HD in a Ziplock bag and slam it in the freezer for 12 hours. Pull it out the next day and very quickly plug it into my machine, copying what I can as quickly as possible until the drive dies again, repeating until all files are copied and safe. If.....that don't work, move onto the extreme heat. A Shrink wrap gun works best, but a hairdryer will do the trick if that is all you have. Wrap one end of the HD in a towel and use the shrink wrap gun or dryer to heat the hard drive. Very quickly plug it in and copy files until finished. Repeat until all necessary files are copied and you are done.
You may not think it works, but when you are down to that as your last option...it does.
