[H-GEN] Assistance Required

[Arjen Lentz]

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Hi,

On Tue, 2002-03-26 at 22:13, Jason Henry Parker wrote:
>  * If it works, buy a sodding tape drive already.  Two if possible.

Or burn CDs. For a business, that can be nicer; creates a nice archive
that lasts for a while.

 
> Also take a look on slashdot; a few weeks ago there was a story about
> people who are taking apart their drives, and putting the mechanics
> into clear cases.  Many of the comments were stuff along the line of
> `that's insane!', but a few were testimonials from people who've done
> things similar to what you're about to attempt, and they may have
> described how they went about creating some semblance of clean room
> conditions.
> 
> I remember at least one slashdotter didn't even bother clearing out
> dust and just went for it, and had things work.

I've seen people actually use drives that didn't have closed casing. One
guy (longlong time ago) drilled a hole in the casing of 40 MB Seagate
HD, because it would run fine, but have problems starting up: the heads
would stick to the disks if the PC had been powered off. So he needed to
nudge the top head arm just a bit to get things started. Hey, it worked!

I think you could make a case for "any dust will be spun off due to the
centrifugal force of the spinning disks". The airfilter inside HDs that
I have seen actually assumes this, too: it's on one side, like a tunnel,
catching dust.
The problem is of course that dust sometimes sticks, or at that speed
smack into the wrong spot of a head. The latter may not be a prob,
since, if you open the casing while the heads are parked, and then close
it again before spin-up, the dust will be gone before the heads get near
it. Leaves the sticky stuff....

Well, considering the drive is already dead, trying some weird stuff
can't make things worse. But I agree with the assessment others have
made: the customer really needs to work on the basis that his data is
gone, and get on with things. If you happen to be able to recover
something later, that'd just be sheer luck.


By the way, Alan Solomon (from Solomon AntiVirus in the UK) used to do
HD recovery. People sent him the HDs, and they could do all kinds of
magic. Of course, these days HDs are much smaller, so it may be more
difficult. But there may still be some companies out there that provide
this kind of service. It'll cost a bit, but if the data is valuable it
might be worth it.


Regards,
Arjen.

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