Need some hard drive repairs

[jackry]

I have a few external hard drives that are not working. Now i know the may or may not be able to be repaired. The thing is I have thing on them that i don't want just anyone seeing. Has anyone had this problem? Is there anyone out there that can help with this problem. I'm sure I'm not the first one that wants confidential data recovery.

 

[trawler69]

Like Onion says above. If you get them working you might try one of the several tools to securely wipe it, assuming you want to get rid of the data. There have been loads of posts in the past with links to examples. If you have some that don't work and you don't want the data recovered by others best physically smash the platters with a hammer. They'd have to be severely desperate if they wanted to piece that together and, yes, I know it can be done.

 

[jackry]

Thanks guys, time to pull out the tools.

 

[trawler69]

I've got my own repairs to do today as well. A friend's raid array is down for the count. two of the drives are fried from a raid 5. BAD power surge that fried everything on them, blew the board and everything. only things that survived was the third drive, cd drive and the two gigabit network cards.

he's bought three replacement drives identicle models and firmware to the ones he had. we're going to swap out the platters from one of the failed drives into one of the new ones and clone it to one of the other two drives. Once we get that done, we'll put it, the old good drive and the third new one into the new computer and rebuild the array.

optimistically i'm giving us a 20% chance of success

You might actually be better off to just swap the circuit boards from a new drive to an old drive. The motor and heads will be fine and it will save having to open the drive and risk damage to the platters and heads from dust etc. then clone to one of the new drives and repeat the process. I would give you a 90% chance of success using this method.

 

[trawler69]

^ I'm glad it worked. Sounds like the effects of a lightning strike, they can be awesome, I have had the pleasure of repairing fire alarms after them with ic's blown in half. I wasn't aware quite how bad the damage was. Well done.

 

[sheep]

I read somewhere recently that the controller board also contains info on bad sectors and blocks on that PARTICULAR drive. If this is true and you are using a different controller, don't write anything to it. Get the stuff off ASAP then trash the crapped out drive.

 

[floating]

crossing our finger's we typed in 'dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc'
the newly put together drive and the one sitting on top of the blade's chasis both sprang to life making reassuring read and write noises. we waited until it finished and looked at each other unexpectently when it finished without an error. "it can't be that god damn easy" he says to me.

Amazing story Orion, job wel done!

Which proves a valuable point for others: never mistake raid arrays for being backups. Always have an >off site< backup. If you have a fire, sprinkler installation going crazy or a power surge, no onsite copy will be any good for you. copy your data and store it safely somewhere else.

 

[Paws]

Like Onion says above.

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