Harddrive broke without warning?

[simpsonfan409]

i didn't experience any slowdowns or dropouts up until this point. i had a sound driver related bluescreen when i was messing around with voicemeeter, used the windows restore tool and now one of my harddrives stopped working (which also happened to have the bootloader on it). any harddrive related programs like crystaldiskinfo or the diskmanager refuse to open when i do manage to boot into windows. is there anything i can do from here to either recover my stuff (save yourself the backup speech), or check if the drive is still usable without deleting data?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yea thats pretty common. If you care about the data and don't have backup send it off to data recovery and there is a chance they can get the data from it. Its likely going to be hundreds of dollars or more though.

[jaslion]

Thats usually what happens yes. Its actually rare that they give warnings before failiure.

 

To check well have a love linux usb with like ubuntu on it and see if it can appear in any way there blank or not. If not well yeah probably cooked.

[leclod]

I'd try to connect the drive to another desktop to see if it appears in the Disk Manager

Or I'd disconnect it and reinstall a clean windows (if needed). Then reconnect it and same as before.

Edited June 9, 2024 by leclod

[Godlygamer23]

Depending on the root cause of the failure, you could try swapping the board from another hard drive of the same model, and get the data off. I wouldn't run it long term like that, just long enough to get the data off.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

55 minutes ago, simpsonfan409 said:

i didn't experience any slowdowns or dropouts up until this point. i had a sound driver related bluescreen when i was messing around with voicemeeter, used the windows restore tool and now one of my harddrives stopped working (which also happened to have the bootloader on it). any harddrive related programs like crystaldiskinfo or the diskmanager refuse to open when i do manage to boot into windows. is there anything i can do from here to either recover my stuff (save yourself the backup speech), or check if the drive is still usable without deleting data?

If your not going to send it in for data recovery, and your technically skilled enough to do this, you can get another hard drive of the same model, go into the cleanest room of your house, then open them up and take the platters of the one that failed and put it in the working one...you might have some bad sectors after this and its entirely based on if you do this right but I have done this before with success

[Godlygamer23]

4 minutes ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

If your not going to send it in for data recovery, and your technically skilled enough to do this, you can get another hard drive of the same model, go into the cleanest room of your house, then open them up and take the platters of the one that failed and put it in the working one...you might have some bad sectors after this and its entirely based on if you do this right but I have done this before with success

I wouldn't even suggest this as an action for anyone to perform. Maybe you'll have success, or you'll end up completely destroying the platters.

 

"Cleanest room of your house" is such a generic statement that it bears absolutely no meaning. Every normal room in a home has dust in it, except maybe ones that aren't occupied, but to make the suggestion means you're making assumptions on your part about the state of their home. What happens if they go to the "cleanest room" of their house, and things end up going wrong because of dust issues? Who takes ownership at that point for the failure? Hard drives aren't manufactured or opened up in clean rooms for nothing.

 

This also assumes they're using a standard hard drive anyway. Theirs could be filled with helium for all you know.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

Just now, Godlygamer23 said:

I wouldn't even suggest this as an action for anyone to perform. Maybe you'll have success, or you'll end up completely destroying the platters.

 

"Cleanest room of your house" is such a generic statement that it bears absolutely no meaning. Every normal room in a home has dust in it, except maybe ones that aren't occupied, but to make the suggestion means you're making assumptions on your part about the state of their home. What happens if they go to the "cleanest room" of their house, and things end up going wrong because of dust issues? Who takes ownership at that point for the failure? Hard drives aren't manufactured or opened up in clean rooms for nothing.

Bro calm the fuck down what i meant by if you not going to send it in for data recovery is, if he is going to otherwise throw the goddam hard drive away he might as well try this out.

jesus fuck

[Godlygamer23]

4 minutes ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

Bro calm the fuck down[.]

I'm stating my view. But either way, no I won't. Opening up a hard drive is not something to be taken lightly, and doing that could literally break their chances of getting data back at all. All it takes is a small piece of dust getting stuck under the heads, and grinding the shit outta the platters, and that whole region is corrupted.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

2 minutes ago, Godlygamer23 said:

I'm stating my view. But either way, no I won't. Opening up a hard drive is not something to be taken lightly, and doing that could literally break their chances of getting data back at all. All it takes is a small piece of dust getting stuck under the heads, and grinding the shit outta the platters, and that whole region is corrupted.

you obviously havent read a single thing i said

In addition to that HDDs are a lot more resiliant than you think

[Alex Atkin UK]

9 minutes ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

Bro calm the fuck down what i meant by if you not going to send it in for data recovery is, if he is going to otherwise throw the goddam hard drive away he might as well try this out.

jesus fuck

Except you usually can swap the PCB without opening the drive, so this was bad advise to begin with.  Plus as mentioned helium filled is becoming common, so even in a clean room/chamber you can be out of luck.

 

Quite apart from the fact I've taken a lot of junk drives apart and never once been able to remove the platters.  The bolts holding them down are torqued so hard I've never once been able to loosen them.  Plus it would be almost impossible to remove them from the head assembly without trashing them.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

If you guys are going to be like this I will make a youtube video doing this exact thing in the dirtiest room of my house proving this can be done

 

thats not ever the point

 

if your only option is to throw the hard drive away because you will not do ANY type of data recovery then even 20% of your data back is better than 0%

and its also a very good learning experience

If a 20GB piece of shit maxtor hard drive can work with this method and successfully re-allocate a couple sectors then a newer hdd can def work with this method to...
ik cause ive tried with a couple

[podkall]

If you do manage to somehow get the drive running, you want to get any important data to another drive, because sometimes drives fail, but when they start failing, they can fail again and not recover again.

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

you obviously havent read a single thing i said

In addition to that HDDs are a lot more resiliant than you think

I actually read your entire post, which is why I gave you the response that I did.

 

They're manufactured in clean rooms for a reason. If the hard drive works now after doing any kind of swap(this goes for any scenario involving hard drives, not just this), dust could move around, land on an area where the head hits, and now you're chewing up the platters. 

 

You literally have no idea what their environment is. And by using phrases such as "cleanest room of your house", you are leaving it up to the user - essentially not protecting them at all. They can do everything proper, and literally ruin their drive completely because of environmental issues that are out of their control.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

1 minute ago, Godlygamer23 said:

I actually read your entire post, which is why I gave you the response that I did.

 

They're manufactured in clean rooms for a reason. If the hard drive works now after doing any kind of swap(this goes for any scenario involving hard drives, not just this), dust could move around, land on an area where the head hits, and now you're chewing up the platters. 

 

You literally have no idea what their environment is. And by using phrases such as "cleanest room of your house", you are leaving it up to the user - essentially not protecting them at all. They can do everything proper, and literally ruin their drive completely because of environmental issues that are out of their control.

do you know what else will ruin their hard drive? throwing it away...in which case also there have been documented cases of people going through other peoples trash and doing this exact thing and stealing their data

there is a reason why we drill holes through hard drives

[Godlygamer23]

6 minutes ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

If you guys are going to be like this I will make a youtube video doing this exact thing in the dirtiest room of my house proving this can be done

 

thats not ever the point

 

if your only option is to throw the hard drive away because you will not do ANY type of data recovery then even 20% of your data back is better than 0%

and its also a very good learning experience

If a 20GB piece of shit maxtor hard drive can work with this method and successfully re-allocate a couple sectors then a newer hdd can def work with this method to...
ik cause ive tried with a couple

One success doesn't obliterate all the failures of doing that sort of thing.

 

Do you know what else? I have a hard drive that is something like 80GB that's IDE based. It doesn't have a filter on it. There's a giant hole that leads to the interior of the drive. What does that tell you in comparison to modern drives? Designs change, and requirements change. Modern platters are far more dense with data, and so the heads likely also sit closer to the surface. In the past, a piece of dust of X size may have been fine. That same piece of dust might be enough to damage a modern hard drive.

 

Additionally, if the drive is filled with helium instead, that drive cannot be opened at all under normal circumstances.

[IBM_THINKPAD_R51]

im not saying try this first, Im saying try this last

[Godlygamer23]

1 minute ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

do you know what else will ruin their hard drive? throwing it away...in which case also there have been documented cases of people going through other peoples trash and doing this exact thing and stealing their data

there is a reason why we drill holes through hard drives

I made one suggestion to the OP, which is swapping boards with the same model drive. Nothing else. 

[Ryker Robb]

2 hours ago, simpsonfan409 said:

i didn't experience any slowdowns or dropouts up until this point. i had a sound driver related bluescreen when i was messing around with voicemeeter, used the windows restore tool and now one of my harddrives stopped working (which also happened to have the bootloader on it). any harddrive related programs like crystaldiskinfo or the diskmanager refuse to open when i do manage to boot into windows. is there anything i can do from here to either recover my stuff (save yourself the backup speech), or check if the drive is still usable without deleting data?

What model of drive? The first thing you would want to do is just listen to the drive (maybe record it?) and see if you hear anything unusual. You can usually find examples of of what the drive should sound like on youtube. Next you should try it with a different pc if you can, just to rule out the pc being the problem.

2 hours ago, simpsonfan409 said:

any harddrive related programs like crystaldiskinfo or the diskmanager refuse to open when i do manage to boot into windows. is there anything i can do from here to either recover my stuff (save yourself the backup speech), or check if the drive is still usable without deleting data?

First, check to see if it's being detected at all (device manager). If not, it's unlikely you'll be able to do anything with any 3rd party program. If crystaldisk and diskmanager refuse to open, it's likely the drive is locked up/ not responding, or there's a problem with your sata cable or controller, which is why i would recommend trying a new sata cable on a different pc if you can.

[Ryker Robb]

2 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Depending on the root cause of the failure, you could try swapping the board from another hard drive of the same model, and get the data off. I wouldn't run it long term like that, just long enough to get the data off.

 

2 hours ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

If your not going to send it in for data recovery, and your technically skilled enough to do this, you can get another hard drive of the same model, go into the cleanest room of your house, then open them up and take the platters of the one that failed and put it in the working one...you might have some bad sectors after this and its entirely based on if you do this right but I have done this before with success

And this is assuming the guy even has a donor drive, which he most likely does not. Also, a pcb swap, on most modern drives, also requires the bios chip to be swapped onto the new board, and sometimes the bios is integrated onto the main ic controller.

 https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_firmware_transfer.html

And, head swaps typically have higher success rates than platter swaps, especially in a non professional environment, but i would also want to confirm the drive is actually dead before doing anything like this.

[Ryker Robb]

1 hour ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Do you know what else? I have a hard drive that is something like 80GB that's IDE based. It doesn't have a filter on it. There's a giant hole that leads to the interior of the drive.

This actually doesn't sound right. There should be a filter in it. And there absolutely should not be a giant hole that leads to the interior of the drive. Are you talking about this?

There should absolutely be a seal over that hole. 

[Godlygamer23]

1 hour ago, Ryker Robb said:

This actually doesn't sound right. There should be a filter in it. And there absolutely should not be a giant hole that leads to the interior of the drive. Are you talking about this?

There should absolutely be a seal over that hole. 

You are absolutely correct. I misremembered - I pulled out the hard drive, and looked at the area I was talking about, and there was glue residue around that area, obviously indicating the previous presence of something covering it. 

 

Googling it though indicates it was simply a warranty void label. Don't know if it was a foil style label, or a standard label.

Spoiler

 

 

 

[Godlygamer23]

1 hour ago, Ryker Robb said:

And this is assuming the guy even has a donor drive, which he most likely does not. Also, a pcb swap, on most modern drives, also requires the bios chip to be swapped onto the new board, and sometimes the bios is integrated onto the main ic controller.

 https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_firmware_transfer.html

And, head swaps typically have higher success rates than platter swaps, especially in a non professional environment, but i would also want to confirm the drive is actually dead before doing anything like this.

Based on my further research, it seems like simply swapping the PCB would be a terrible idea, and basically throwing caution to the wind.

[whispous]

5 hours ago, IBM_THINKPAD_R51 said:

you obviously havent read a single thing i said

In addition to that HDDs are a lot more resiliant than you think

This is extremely bad advice.

[AI_Must_Di3]

Ive been down the road of trying to fix bad hdd's and its waaayyy harder than you would think. First and biggest problem is you have to get a donor drive that is a exact match for your broken one. When i say exact match, i mean EXACT! It has to be the same write conditions, the write/read/erase logic listing, the type of head/magnet, etc... its a fools errand to try to open it up and swap them. You can change the pcb on the outside, but again you have to find the same type so the write read and erase conditions and sectoring are the same or it wont be able to read the data. You used to be able to stick them in the freezer and freeze them to get one more quick run out of them to pull data but thats a hit or miss thing too. If the drive is dead dead then it cant hurt to try any of these but success is a low percentage.

  The hole in the drive is a pressure release for when they get hot, dont mess with that hole or it will def not work again.