[TriLUG] OT: Laptop Hard Drive

[William Sutton]

It isn't free, but SpinRite is really good recovery software.  It goes 
low-level to recover things, and fits on a floppy for boot.

William Sutton

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, Tom Eisenmenger wrote:
>
>> If you're just looking for a quick spin-up so you can back the drive up, 
>> I've had some success putting the drive in a ziplock freezer bag, squeeze 
>> out as much air as possible, put it in a freezer for an hour or so, then 
>> install and try to boot.
>
> I forgot about this. I've had great success with this too. (You may need a 
> couple of cycles to get all the data off.) Keep the drive in the ziplock when 
> you pull it out of the freezer or the electronics will get wet and the drive 
> won't work (in the only case I got the drive wet this way, it recovered when 
> dried by warming to room temp). Don't try to boot from it. That requires a 
> high level of integrity in the drive. For the moment just try to recover 
> sectors. Put it in an external USB enclosure and try dd'ing the whole drive. 
> If there are bad sectors (doesn't sound like your problem, yours sounds like 
> a dead drive mechanism) then ddrescue retries bad sectors. ddrescue will time 
> out on a bad sector, write the sector number to a log and then proceed 
> allowing you to get the rest of the drive. Then you can send ddrescue back to 
> retry only the bad sectors till you have to refreeze the drive.
>
>> Out of desperation, I've also whacked the drive with the palm of my hand 
>> (FYI, "whack" is indeed a technical term ;-)  It is preferable to remove it 
>> from the PC before doing so.
>
> haven't tried that one. I'd try it after being sure you can't recover it by 
> freezing.
>
> Joe
>
> -- 
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
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