[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

On Sat, 13 Apr 2019, shay walters via TriLUG wrote:

>    I've seen some videos of opening up a drive that had the head stuck to
> the platter, and manually rotating the platter while retracting the head,
> but once you break that seal, you're just asking for trouble, unless you
> have some sort of clean environment to do the work in.

If you have no other option, it's worth it to try to get the data off. You only 
need to access the drive once. Hopefully any trouble doesn't start till later.

Apparently taking the lid off a drive isn't as traumatic as I thought. I once 
offered to backup someone's laptop drive, a process which involved taking the 
drive out and dd'ing it on another machine. I told him to take the drive out and 
give it to me. He assured me he could handle it. He handed me the drive with the 
lid off (platter and heads visible) saying "here you are". I didn't let him know 
that I thought he'd stewed his (un backed-up) drive. I had thought that the lid 
had a bearing for the top end of the spindle, but there was no bearing in the 
lid. The lid was just a cover. It seems that the drive is only supported at the 
bottom (at least for laptop drives). He put the lid back on, screwed it shut, we 
backed it up and it's been running ever since.

To the OP; if you get the drive running, back it up with ddrescue asap.

https://www.linux.com/learn/intro-to-linux/2017/3/gnu-ddrescue-best-damaged-drive-rescue

make sure you use a logfile so the second run of ddrescue only goes to the 
unrecovered sectors.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!