Swapping Drive Platters ?

[nheather]

Let me state up front that - "yes I know the chances of it working are extremely slim".

Background.

Main Windows 7 drive has died. On power up it make a slow clunking sound, really loud about once every 2 seconds. This isn't the dainty little clicks or squeals but heavy loud clunks.

Drive does not appear in BIOS.

So have an identical donor drive. Have tried swapping the boards - its not that - in fact the board from the dead disk works in the donor disk.

Took the back off the dead disk and the platter has mirror finish, not a scratch in sight. Single platter.

I'd like some of the data but its not critical enough to pay £100+ to attempt professional recovery.

So going to try a platter swap. Once again, I know it probably won't work and even if it does it won't last long - so it will be recover what I can and then bin it.

So my QUESTION.

Assuming I swap, connect as a secondary drive and it appears in the BIOS what should I do next.

Do I just boot to windows, connect up my flash drive and copy using windows.

Or should I use a utility.

Or is there something else I need to do.

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[Deleted member 138126]

The fact that you've already opened it means you are doomed. A speck of dust under the heads is enough to ruin the drive. And you only need one failure for the drive electronics to go into error-correcting mode, which will just cause more and more damage. I opened a drive that had a small handful of sector relocations (which for me is instant dismissal), and within 2-3 minutes it stopped responding. It started making a high-pitched beeping sound, and the heads just parked themselves and it refused to do anything more.

 

[CaptainCrash]

I suppose it's worth a go as a shot to nothing (a quick google will bring up some howtos) - in your favour, it's a single-platter drive which increases the likelihood of success from "zero" to "extremely remote." A clean room or at least some sort of ultra-clean environment would help, but it sounds like that ship has already sailed.

I doubt if any software utility will do much good if it's a mechanical problem.

If by some miracle you do get it up and running, *don't* boot from it, install it as a secondary drive. You want to keep any disk activity to the absolute minimum necessary to recover the data, and loading Windows would stress it unnecessarily.

edit: sorry, I didn't read your post properly.

If the disk is visible in the BIOS, I'd first of all boot from a Macrium rescue flash drive and try copying the entire disk as a complete image to another (larger) drive - that way, ithe drive should be read linearly sector-by-sector which might minimise seeking, and then you can work on the image to recover data rather than the broken drive itself. It's an incredibly long shot though.

 

[d_brennen]

Would be amazed if it worked but you've got this far, nowt to lose. Post back the results here!

 

[Akagi]

As above really.

 

[nheather]

Thanks for the replies.

I had already decided that I wasn't going to pay for professional recovery as the data isn't worth that much.

And since the drive is confirmed mechanically dead I have already lost the data.

So I don't see that there is anything to lose in trying a platter swap. I've already accepted the chance of it working is tiny but the chance of recovering data if I don't is 0%.

So I was really after advice about what I should do if by some miracle it does work, even temporarily.

Thanks for the advice about Macrium - I will look into that.

But a question about that. This is a 500GB drive mostly full of applications and games that I don't care about.

What I want is my outlook PST and My Documents which is probably about 2GB at most.

Would it not be better to attach as a secondary disk and copy those specifically.

I understand the merits of Macrium reading sector by sector but if it fails 40GB in then chances that there be nothing of what I want in the recovered data.

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[Deleted member 138126]

Yeah, definitely just try to grab what you can, as quickly as you can. Don't plug it in until you are booted into Windows and have nothing that will interrupt you.

 

[darael]

The best thing you can do is avoid dragging the heads across the platters, as you already have done. There's a very good reason the heads have a very thin air cushion created for them by the spinning platters.

As you have a single platter drive, a piece of folded plastic will be of much help to you in safely keeping the heads from the platters.

I recommend a read of some threads on HDD Guru forums for some advice and help.