IBM drive toast?

[Nailbunny]

This morning I woke up to my IBM hard drive making the "click of death" sound. The machine will not boot into XP at all. Since it's a hardware failure, is it still possible to recover the data off this drive without sending it to a pro recovery $hop?

Thanks,
-NB

 

[Dave332]

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I had this happen with my seagate 40GB, and unless you want to invest a lot of money, you're hosed. Sorry.

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: Dave332
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I had this happen with my seagate 40GB, and unless you want to invest a lot of money, you're hosed. Sorry.

Yep, sorry.

 

[BadThad]

Originally posted by: BadThad

Originally posted by: Dave332
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I had this happen with my seagate 40GB, and unless you want to invest a lot of money, you're hosed. Sorry.

Yep, sorry.

Nonetheless, you should run the IBM/Hitachi hard drive diag program on it and see what it says.

 

[Nailbunny]

I figured it was toast, just wanted to be sure though. I think the warranty just ran out too ... boo. Thanks for the input.

 

[klaviernista]

read somewhere on the high tech forum that someone who had a hard drive with a head failure (head crash) was trying to transfer the platters from one HD into another, but I don;t know if he suceeded. Other thenthat you are pretty much screwed unless you want to pay beaucoup $$$$.

 

[Fern]

Prolly wrong here, but isn't there some sort of "freezer trick" which temporarily works to allow for data recovery? Just a thought.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Nailbunny
This morning I woke up to my IBM hard drive making the "click of death" sound. The machine will not boot into XP at all. Since it's a hardware failure, is it still possible to recover the data off this drive without sending it to a pro recovery $hop?

Thanks,
-NB

Mine did that once. I re-installed the HD upside-down, at the suggestion of a friend who had done the same thing with a flaky Maxtor HD. Surprisingly, it spun up again. I took that opportunity to use Ghost 2003 with the -fro switch to back up my HD onto another. While still upside-down, I ran HDTach as well, and noticed some major "spikage". I ran HDTach's destructive write-tests, along with using DFT to do a zero-wipe a few times, and the exerciser (while upside-down), and the "spikage" went away. I was then able to re-install the drive again right-side-up and used it sucessfully for non-critical data for a month, and it seemed ok, but I didn't trust it anymore, so I sold it.

It could well have just been a fluke, and mounting it upside-down really didn't have anything to do with it deciding to spin up again after the CoD, but it really couldn't hurt to try it.

One thing that I did also notice, was that the nominal temps went up a bit around the time of the CoD incedent, so I think that the bearings or something might have started having a slight problem. Those drives (75GXP series) used ceramic ball-bearings, along with rampload heads.

 

[Askalon]

yes, the freezer trick is to put it in the freezer to make it really cold, then install and do a quick data recovery.

repeat as needed

 

[klaviernista]

Just FYI, freezer trick works because the coefficient of thermal expansion of the disk and the spindle of drive are different. A head crash (the ominous lcick of death) is quite simply what it sounds like, the hard drive head has crashed into the surface of the recording medium, where it generally gets stuck. The clicking sound your hearing is the drive motor trying to unstick the head (alternatively it could be the head scraping across the surface of the disk). By freezing the hard drive, the head and the disk are separated when the materials from which they are made contract from the cold.

That upside down install trick is a nifty idea. Though I'm not certain it would work in all head crash cases it is worth a try.