Typhoon Ondoy and Hard Disks

[paugie]

Typhoon Ondoy sunk 2 computers in a missionary office i help out with hardware wise.

The casualties include two 80gb Hitachi hard drives. They didn't look bad from the outside when they dried out.

I don't want to turn them on until maybe next week when they may truly be dried.

Anybody have an inkling of what I can expect?

 

[timwhit]

Well, if they work at all I would copy the data off of them and take them out of service.

 

[Fushigi]

I can't say if any water would have gotten to the platters. For the circuit board area, give it a shallow bath in 90% alcohol (70% is common in the US but you need 90%). The alc does not leave a residue and will help wash away any potentially conductive particles left by the water.

 

[ddrueding]

Fushigi's suggestion is excellent. I might even suggest that you remove the circuit board and rinse it separately. There is a vent hole in the drive to allow the platters to breathe (or in this case, drown) so I wouldn't hold out too much hope.

 

[paugie]

in the meantime, I borrowed my daughter's hair dryer and started blowing them dry. and...
water started squirting out of what David mentioned - a breather hole. lots of it.
hahaha and a sigh!

their latest backup was two months ago. like I said, only hardware assistance. I can remind them to backup but I don't do it for them.
sometimes they do it while I watch, coz they remembered to do it while I was around.

Did I mention the boxes were on the floor when 4-1/2 feet of water came into the house? The monitors were on top of the tables (of course) so they were saved.

 

[Bozo]

If they were in salt water, I would rinse everything in distilled water first and then the alcohol bath. Don't use the high setting on the blow dryer, the low setting will do the job without adding unnesessary heat.

Good Luck

 

[Stereodude]

I'm sure the water wasn't clean either... I'd say they're very likely toast unless you send them to a data recovery place, and even they might not be able to save them. Powering them on will probably eliminate the option of later data recovery by further damaging them, so unless professional data recovery has already been completely ruled out (due to cost vs. importance of the data) I wouldn't attempt to power them up.

 

[Mercutio]

Don't use the high setting on the blow dryer, the low setting will do the job without adding unnesessary heat.

I've had good luck with electronics on the lowest possible setting in an oven. I've rescued cell phones and music players that way.

Of course, those things were dropped in fresh water, not salt.

 

[MaxBurn]

Is the data at all important? If so I wouldn't even power them up, the spinning platters and whatever residue is left from the water will destroy stuff and instantly with head crash wouldn't it? All drives have at least one breather hole, I would assume at least some water got in. I would consider sending it straight to a recovery house.

 

[Howell]

Aaction should be tempered based on what the data was worth.

I would go for a combination of what Bozo, dd and Merc suggested. Remove the circuit board and deal with it seperately.

You will want to rinse the drive in a distilled water bath to dissolve the salt and other minerals. I would position the drive so that anything that detached from the platters falls away from the platters. You would want to change the water and periodically test the. salinity.

Finally evaporate out the water by baking and rubbing alchohol.

The biggest danger is really with the flying head and a particle of salt.

 

[P5-133XL]

I'm sorry, but I would contend that if you actually got salt water inside the HD, then I really don't see how you can get the salt out by rinsing it out. On the other side of the breather hole is a fine filter designed to keep fine particles out, equalize air pressure and stabilize humidity. You get the drive wet, the filter will get saturated and eventually the salt water will penetrate the filter with a relatively small amount of dissolved salt. I doubt that more than a few drops would get through but that is plenty enough to coat the interior with some salt crystals. Rinsing the drive with distilled water is not going to be able to get rid of the salt on the inside because you are not going to be able to get enough distilled water inside to use as a solvent.

Even if you could get enough distiled water inside, baking won't help because the distilled water would just evaporate leaving the salt behind. You have to rinse till there is NO salt left by draining water out through the filtered breather hole till there is no salt inside and that is going to take a very long time because it is only going to allow very small droplets through. Once no salt exists then you can bake.

If the data is valuable enough, the drive needs to go to a data recovery center, un-altered: Don't even try to do anything, just leave it to the professionals for your efforts will just complicate theirs. If it isn't valuable enough, then clean what you can externally and hope for the best internally when you power it up.

 

[paugie]

Wow! Thanks for the numerous responses. It seems like there's very little likelihood of getting any data back. More than a few drops entered the drives, because every time (I've done it six times already) I heat them, some more water seeps out of the breather hole. I suppose 5 cc's of water already for each drive.

The water's not clean but certainly not salt water. The data is mostly personal stuff and some financial, which won't merit further cost in recovery.

I will wait another week for them to dry out. Power up and if it runs and checks out on diagnostics, I'll probably run it for a while and install it in a machine for indigent kids.

If not, then there will be a magnet or two for those same kids to play around with. ;-)

Again, thank you for the response.

BTW, the motherboards, memory and processors checked out fine after rinsing in clean tap water and air drying for 3 days. One is an AsRock w/ a Socket A processor and the other is a 5 month old MSI with an LE1600 processor.

 

[Bozo]

Better hang on and get to higher ground Paugi! Looks like you are going to get hammered again.

 

[paugie]

I am sitting tight. The provinces up north are getting it this time.
But it seems this one is blowing a lot with less rain. The one which wreaked havoc here last week had very little wind but a lot of rain.
This time the government was ready. But, again, they have closed the barn door after the animals have left.