Hey I'm really liking the information on the DIY filter boxes, I'll have to look into that! Doubt I have the expertise to build but perhaps one of you may attempt your own and show us? Love the little bag thing, maybe that'd be easier to fabricate. Not sure how much those cost.
Anyway, here's some more test results. We're going to test the effect of removing and re-attaching the magnetic plate which sits on top of the actuator. How delicate is it, especially without the right tool?
- Opened up hard drive and pulled off magnetic plate by hand. Not very difficult, slightly grasping the plate from both ends and gently lifting. The magnet holding it underneath is quite strong though. The professionals seem to use a magnet sucker tool thingie, which is better.
- Replaced metal plate. Lined it up and it snapped back, no damage seemed to have been inflicted on the drive heads due to this motion.
- Closed the hard drive. The whole process took about 10 seconds.
- Drive detected by windows, another 2 hours of reading = Data Integrity exactly the same = 65% recoverable. No head failure issues. Is one test meaningful though? Nope!
New Test, since the value of one removal does not statistically mean much:
Repeat the above test but with FIFTEEN consecutive removals and re-attachments. Again being careful not to be sloppy but in no way going for pinpoint accuracy on the removal and replace. Whole procedure of 15 remove and re-attaches took about 30 seconds. Nothing else done to the drive during this process. Drive lid closed and hooked up to windows for another test:
Results: No change in data integrity (another 2 hour process).
Conclusion: the plate which is magnetically held on top of the acutator can be removed by hand during a repair procedure without damage to the head as long as you're not sloppy. Hard drive cover was used to sheild platters during this experiment and minimise the effects of any other variable. Although there's probably a million microscopic variables I havent even accounted for as previously mentioned with the screw fragments etc.
Next test: Drive head removal and reattachment and its effect on data integrity. The big one!
Step 1: Removed all torque screws from the test ebay hard drive. There's also one underneath the drive from the PCB side which holds the actuator arm. You must not remove this actuator screw by turning the hard drive upside down because the actuator arm will not be connected to anything and crash into the upper lid.
Step 2: This is going to sound ridiculous but.. took a party balloon and rubbed it furiously against the wall and cellotaped it down on my work area. To attract dust!
Step 3: Flipped the hard drive lid but kept it so it partially covered the platters to aid sheilding. Started the stop watch and positioned the balloon overshadowing my work area.
Step 4: Undid the ribbon screws and decided to use the orange ramp as my portable comb for the heads. However the comb and heads are not connected in any way, the slightest movement of one or the other either way and the heads will flick loose and this apparantly is very bad. Game over if this happens, although it may be fun to test this next
Step 5: Grabbed two cocktail-sticks/matchsticks and snipped them to length. Used them to bolster a connection between the actuator and the orange ramp (ie my new head comb). Had to use tweezers for this, was very fiddly but no where near impossible. Undid the orange ramp torque screw and lifted the whole thing up out of the drive. Examined the heads to make sure they were still aligned (about 10 seconds) and dropped the whole lot back into the drive and secured it.
Step 6: Reattached everything making sure not to even touch the platter at all. Closed the lid, screwed everything back down. Stopped stopwatch, total time 1min 48 secs.
Step 7: Plugged device back into windows, recognised as 70GB as usual.
Step 8: 2 hours of copying the data back - Data recovered = 56.3% (A loss of 9%).
Conclusion: Head replacements are possible! However my ghetto methods are probably no where near efficient. But a ~10% loss of data for a first hard drive head swap isn't bad, had this been a full recovery I'd be looking at 63GB recovered out of 70GB (Assuming the failure was purely related to the head). Still, 7GB loss is not going to win any awards
Also this process may have degraded data which was already degraded and so I would not have been able to account for this.
Better ways to improve the method:
- That head comb tool would be so much easier than bolstering the actuator to the orange ramp, it was shoddy at best and would have surely fell apart under any kind of tension or torsion. This solution is really ugly. Tweezers definitely important. However this method is possible. Maybe someone can knock up some sort of head comb on one of those programmable model making CNC machines? Would have made the method almost childsplay.
- The balloon I hope helped to attract any dust particles away from the platter. Also gave it a spray with furniture polish because it's supposed to attract dust too. Anyways I've ended up with a shiny balloon to play with. Seriously though, was this just crazy?
- If you're attempting this, please test it on a test drive first. You learn so much and you really don't see how difficult it is until your trying to manipulate tiny delicate components first hand. I'm no expert and I'm hardly a practical genius, but practise makes perfect. I recommend playing with a dead one to learn, have fun!
- Obviously if any of you are creative enough to get your own clean room going (I dont think I am), I think you'd have a shot at a pretty good recovery.
I did spot that some of the 'corrupted' files were only partially corrupted. For example a few were 200MB movie test files which only skipped a few times during playback. Obviously if this file were two smaller 100MB files instead, the recovery percentage would have been higher as one of them would have possibly have been recovered. If your hard drive is full of tiny files you'd probably get a better margin of recovery. I set my windows copy program (Bust Copy) to skip any file completely if it had a transfer problem. Maybe data recovery programs would be able to do a better job but havent looked into that. I loaded the test drive with a range of files to model my original dead one, so whether or not the recovery is truly accurate or not I'm not sure. The good thing that even though only 56% of the drive is recoverable at this point, I can pull off a entire file listing for the whole 70GB drive so at least I have a complete file reference to compare it to what's missing.
All experiments done in the kitchen, on a clean area, but not much else really done to prepare it. My laziness at least gives you a bench mark for what you can improve upon, or at least that's my excuse
Conclusion: Had this particular drive been suffering from a failed head and assuming head transfers between similar models is the correct method to fix this (Seems so from the youtube videos, I believe they swap heads rather than try to fix them) then I would have recovered 70GB -7GB = 63GB = 90% recovery (complete estimate). Is home repair of hard drives possible? One experiment on one hard drive at one time isn't really telling. Doesn't look impossible though and I'm not using any specialist equipment. The balloon doesn't count
Next experiment ideas? What if your attempt goes horribly wrong and the heads make contact, is it game over? Effect of head contact with a) something foreign, b) two heads together? The heads actually look like two smooth black rectangular surfaces, almost the size of 1mm. Maybe they can be cleaned with a squirt of compressed air? That head is a work of art though, very compact, very serious, very opposing to adjustment. Maybe eventually I'll get around to a platter removal and replacement, that looks really difficult though.
Does any of this mean anything, or is it just beginners luck? Im trying to give clear scientific results with no bad advice or bias
Megamox
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