Who needs a clean room

[biostud]

My work place has an external harddrive which function as storage for all our photos. Last month it died, and obviously no backup was ever made. So both our own IT guy and one out in the city tried to get data from it but to no avail, it was totally dead.

Since I had nothing to loose and everything to gain, I opened the harddrive and poked the head a couple of times and assembled the harddrive again. And it worked! So I was able to get 37Gb of photos of the disk, and only 5 files where damaged and unable to copy.

Yay for me!

 

[Scarpozzi]

Awesome. External hard drives are terrible....especially if they're dropped while spinning.

Don't forget that USB sticks and SD cards seem to have a finite number of reads and writes before they eventually die too.

 

[1sikbITCH]

That harddrive didn't stand a chance.

BIOSTUD!

 

[manimal]

came in expecting someone with a clean room who upgraded to a newer model. Was hoping to get gifted a clean room ><


dissapoint


now start charging people 500 bucks for hard drive diagnostics!

 

[DesiPower]

Using external hard drive for reliable back, what could ever go wrong...

 

[inachu]

Frozen hard drives possible fixes are usually doing the 1 inch drop test. To help unlock the R/W head.

 

[Brian Stirling]

It's an old trick that sometimes works. Just give the drive a good smart smack with power off and try again. It may not work but if it does you might be able to save valuable data. But, even if it does come back to life just treat it as walking dead and hurry to copy whatever data you can as you can't know when it will die again.


Brian

 

[rudeguy]

Using external hard drive for reliable back, what could ever go wrong...

Every one of our exec's use them. I cringe every time I look at them.

Its not like we don't have servers with a ton of space on them.

 

[Brovane]

Every one of our exec's use them. I cringe every time I look at them.

Its not like we don't have servers with a ton of space on them.

We started locking down USB ports via policy and cries of anguish were heard from coast to coast. :thumbsup:

 

[rudeguy]

We started locking down USB ports via policy and cries of anguish were heard from coast to coast. :thumbsup:

Last place I worked for did that. If you plugged anything into a USB port, IT would be there within minutes to kick your ass.

At my current job, its not an issue since we don't handle too much private data. The only issue is people crashing PCs with viruses.

 

[biostud]

I work at a school, so it's pictures from events. By my recommendation we are buying two new drives which are going to be duplicated.

 

[rsutoratosu]

any advice? i have one that i opened, the center ring were scratched, what should I try to do ?

 

[rsutoratosu]

its a wd 40gb ide one.. i have spare ide to swap to but not sure what I should try

 

[SlitheryDee]

I like taking external hard drives, powering them up until they start spinning, and then shaking them. There's some kind of gyroscopic effect thingy going on that makes them feel funny.

 

[Legios]

Last place I worked for did that. If you plugged anything into a USB port, IT would be there within minutes to kick your ass.

At my current job, its not an issue since we don't handle too much private data. The only issue is people crashing PCs with viruses.

At my last place any USB device would automatically be encrypted. This was changed to only encrypting the drive if data was moved to it. I think some phones might have been bricked when people went to charge them.

 

[Markbnj]

This is an interesting post about doing something cool with a piece of computing hardware. It's the kind of post I personally like to read. What's it doing in this forum?

 

[alkemyst]

Clean rooms really aren't needed if you are just going to harvest the data immediately and don't have to do microscopic type work on the platters.

Many of the engineers I have worked with have saved drives by transferring platters into a matching device.

The hard part is finding an exact match sometimes.

 

[biostud]

Clean rooms really aren't needed if you are just going to harvest the data immediately and don't have to do microscopic type work on the platters.

Many of the engineers I have worked with have saved drives by transferring platters into a matching device.

The hard part is finding an exact match sometimes.

But they sure don't want you to try. I had to go trough two layers of really hard to remove stickers, before being able to access the screws.

I guess this won't work once they fill helium into the drives.

 

[biostud]

This is an interesting post about doing something cool with a piece of computing hardware. It's the kind of post I personally like to read. What's it doing in this forum?

I got lost

 

[reallyscrued]

Clean rooms really aren't needed if you are just going to harvest the data immediately and don't have to do microscopic type work on the platters.

Many of the engineers I have worked with have saved drives by transferring platters into a matching device.

The hard part is finding an exact match sometimes.

This sounds interesting. Would like to hear more about this.

 

[alkemyst]

This sounds interesting. Would like to hear more about this.

It's just a matter of taking the drives apart down to the platters and reassembling them into the new drive. Sometimes just changing the logic board out worked.

It's not something I recommend for critical data, but if it's just stuff you want to get back cheaply, this can work.

The problem is many drives even though they have the same model numbers, have slightly different components (usually the logic board) and they don't work together.

Sometimes you need specialized tools (usually drivers/bits).

You'd want to use latex or equivalent gloves as well.