Drive Recovery

[Seaswho]

I have a Quantum SE 4.3 GB drive that is dead. It will not spin up and I would like to try recovering the data. ( It is a long story, but the short version is that there may or may not be info on this drive that would be important to me and I won't know until I have a look )

My plan is to buy a couple of retired drives and try switching the media from the bad drive to a good drive.

Is this feasable ?

 

[Will Rickards WT]

It is not advisable to do it yourself. Let a data recovery place do it.
They have clean rooms and the tools necessary.

 

[Fushigi]

Are you considering physically swapping the platters from the dead drive to your replacement? You would need a clean room environment (no dust, filtered air, etc.). Otherwise, contaminants from the air would make the resulting drive unusable.

If you think its the circuitry that died and want to swap the sealed disk platters onto a drive with known-good circuitry, then that should be feasable, as long as it's the exact same model drive.

You may want to consider one of the data recovery services. They are not cheap but are probably the overall best bet for recovering data from a failed drive.

But before all of that, try the drive in another computer or at least use a different power lead from the power supply. It could be a power issue or a drive controller issue.

- Fushigi

 

[Seaswho]

I have tried it in several machines so I think I have established it is the drive itself. I will try to swap the circuitry first, as it looks like I can do this without opening the drive.

If I do open it, and was able to switch the media and get it running, would I be able to strip the data off or is it a case of the air hitting the media immediately corrupting the data ? I am not worried about saving the drive, but just stripping the data off.

I checked into some of the places that do this and they were all in excess of $500 and I don't even know fi thsi drive has anythng on it, so I am reluctant to spend the money.

 

[Buck]

Is this a single platter drive?

 

[Seaswho]

This drive is " 4 recording surfaces" . I am not sure if it is 2 platters or 4 .

 

[Buck]

That would be a two-platter drive. Besides not having a clean room, removing the platters for that drive will render your data recovery attempts futile. Data recovery companies don't even remove platters. Once the disk clamp is loose, and the platters rotate independently, the difficulty of realigning them is insurmountable. Hence, servo data is written to the drive after the platters are secured. Now, replacing the PCBA is possible for amateurs, and for professionals, opening the drive in a clean room and replacing HDAs is possible.

If the drive is truly dead, call a reputable data recovery company like:
Action Front
Data Mechanix
Drive Savers or
Ontrack

. . . they can give you the information needed to help you in your difficult situation.

 

[NRG = mc²]

As others said, don't try to open the sealed platter enclosure, if its not spinning up then either the motor is dead (tough luck) or the circuitry. The latter can be replaced easily enough.

If you swap circuit boards, AFAIK as long as the model is correct, the capacity needn't be the same as the original drive.

 

[Tea]

The SE is a common drive and should be easy to get hold of. I'd try swapping the board with another one - that will only cost you a few dollars and some time. And if that doesn't work, what the hell? Try swapping whatever other bits you can reach. It will run for a little while before it dies. Really old drives (in the 20MB and 200MB classes) will run for ages after they have been opened, as the components are quite large by comparison to current-gen ones. The SE has much tighter tolerances than a 200MB drive, but is still nowhere near the modern 40GB/platter units. After all, you only need it to work for 20 minutes or so, and a 4.3GB drive might set you back CN$40 or so, so why not give it a bash?

 

[jtr1962]

You could try the old freezer trick. Keep the drive in the freezer a few hours, and then try it. Of course, you must somehow protect the drive from condensation while you're doing so. A variation of this worked for me recently. I had a friend's drive that refused to autoconfigure, and put it in the freezer. I initially had no luck right after I took it out, but I let it sit until the next day, after all the condensation evaporated. It then worked fine, and I was able to get all the data off it. Next time around, it didn't recognize again. Funny thing is that the drive tested perfectly while it was running. No bad sectors, and Dtemp said no reallocated sectors, either. I'm guessing there's nothing wrong with the platters or heads, but probably something flaky on the circuit board. A good guess based on my years of experience repairing electronics is the 40 MHz quartz clock crystal on the circuit board. Perhaps the excursion to -10°F was enough to make the quartz crystal start oscillating again. Besides power components like diodes, transistors, and MOSFETS, crystals are the next most common component to fail. I wonder how many "dead" drives can be revived by simply replacing a 50-cent clock crystal.