[TriLUG] OT: hard drive recovery

[David Black]

If it spins up and clicks only in certain spots, the freezer treatment
Joe mentions + repeated dd (skip= and seek= are your friend!) can work
well.  Immediately after it comes out of the freezer, connect and start
trying to copy data.  If it gets worse after warming up, you may be able
to repeat and grab some more blocks.

OTOH if it clicks instead of spinning up, a short drop (an inch or so)
flat onto a table can help unstick the spindle w/o subjecting the drive
to enough Gs to damage it.  Once spinning don't turn it off until you
copied everything you can, or need.  If you do this, understand a
too-high drop will likely make things worse.

If it clicks continuously while spinning, in my experience that means it
is having trouble reading the home servo track, and probably won't yield
any data (all block read requests return an error)... time to call a
recovery service!

Dave

Shawn Hood wrote:
> I have a 80GB Seagate SATA drive out of a MacBook.  It's  has decided
> to start clicking.  It has a couple of years worth of photos and