My Hard Drive Died #6 – Data Recovery Diagnostics: Where to Start and Stop

My Hard Drive Died - Podnutz

Hosted by Steve Cherubino and Scott Moulton of MyHardDriveDied.com.

Topics discussed:

Phreaknic
Second longest computer conference (13^th year, approximately 250 participants)

October 30th-31st, 2009 (Nashville, TN)

DIY Hard Drive Diagnostics: Understanding a Broken Drive
< Link to the Speech Slides > PDF: Big – 39 Megs

How to know what’s wrong with your hard drive

Let’s think about the problem first, let’s listen to the sounds before we disassemble a drive

Stop and think about the problem first, do not take the lid off

It could be a Firmware, Head, Board, Motor or Platter problem.

Seagate and Western Digital have exceptions: replacing the head or known firmware problems

Five Phases of Data Recovery
1) Diagnostic Copying/Imaging the drive

2) Repair Repair the drive, requires hardware or special equipment

3) Image Image, Copy or Recover the physical drive
4) Recovery Perform Logical Recovery of files

5) Repair Repair files or partitions, re-assemble data

Absolutely do not ever run any utilities on the original drive until you image it

CheckDisk, FIXMBR, FIXBOOT, say no to SpinRite (it writes data to the same drive, instead of a destination drive)

Media Tools Pro Data recovery and forensic tool

Do not use USB connectors

It is a dumb connector, it doesn’t handle ATA commands, cannot handle errors very well,

Connect a drive directly to a motherboard instead.

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows
Includes MHDD which is the most popular freeware application for low-level HDD diagnostics.

VICTORIA Russian utility
DDRescue Data recovery tool, copies data from one file or block device

MyRescue A program to rescue the still-readable data from a damaged hard disk.

Recovery Services/Sites

Pandora Recovery
Ontrack Data Recovery

Imaging Software
Only works on good working drives, they do not deal with a physical damaged drive
Acronis True Image, Drive Cloner Rx, Micro-Scope Diagnostic Suite

Chip Quik SMD Removal Kit

TVS Chip

Power Supplies
The heavier they power supply is, the better it is.
Brands: Antec, Cooler Master,

Light Peak Technology
Light Peak is a new high-speed optical cable technology which delivers high bandwidth starting at 10Gb/s.
At 10Gb/s, you could transfer a full-length Blu-Ray movie in less than 30 seconds.
Intel discovery, connects drives via optical interfaces.
Coming to motherboards around 2010.

Email question:

Jeff:
Q: 160GB WD drive, detected as a WDC Rom Model, Drive will click 3 times, MHDD reports a recall fail, what could be the problem?
A: The system area wasn’t read correctly, could be problems with: head, preamp, scratch on the platter or board/firmware damage.

Data Recovery Classes

http://www.myharddrivedied.com/presentations_classes/

Notes by Jorge Hernandez of 123ComputerRepair.com