[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[Pete Soper via TriLUG]

It might be useful to ask the person how valuable the data is and
whether they're aware there are professional services in the business of
doing this kind of recovery. It's easy to loose perspective, but $100,
$500, $5k may not be perceived as expensive for professional services
depending on what's on the disk. But it's easy to get into a "oh no,
that has to be too expensive" mode without actually knowing what the
expense would be. My guess is it's frequently the case the expense is
lower than higher 'cause it boils down to a minimum plus time and
materials and there's a distribution of failures and fixes going from
frequent/very well understood ("just need to flick your wrist", "replace
this chip on the controller") to off the wall ("who knew you could get
so much of the data after holes had been drilled in the platters?")

-Pete

On 4/13/19 12:49 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG wrote:
> 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
>