DIY Perks hi my hard drive sounds fine however it died and I have a lot of things I don't want to loose on it, is there a way to recover those things off that hard drive?
This is a very good video I have 40 years experience repairing hard drives. My first experience was the 300 MB CDC drives that were the size of a washer or dryer. In those days we used to remove individual heads, clean out a boomerang shaped hole that were used to control the airflow, polish the heads using ordinary typing paper and alcohol and reassemble them. Today the components are too small to even attempt those techniques, however the principles involved remain the same. Your first step where you tap it on the tabletop should actually be the second step. First try holding the drive horizontal to the table so that the internal platters are parallel to the table and rapidly rotate the drive clockwise and counterclockwise with a twist of the wrist. The idea here is that the mass of the platters will cause the platters to remain stationary while the heads and the rest of the drive rotate. Repeating the motion four or five times will unstick the heads from the platter. Power up and see if that worked. If that fails a more drastic action is to tap that on the table as you showed. About the dust. It's not the dust you have to worry about. It's contaminants. Frying bacon in the kitchen while repairing a drive in the den has caused heads to crash. Working on the drive in high humidity or well it's raining is a problem. Opening a drive that's cold in warm humid air will definitely cause a head crash. Breathing on it is a big no. Really the only mistake you made in this video is telling someone to blow the dust out. Nor should you use any kind of compressed air, unless you have a special compressor with dryers to remove moisture. When hard drives start they do a purge. That simply means that they spin up and wait briefly for all the dust to be blown off of the desk. In the old days it was a little more complicated than that. Some really old drives ran little brushes in and out of the platters. When a disk spins the atoms of air closest to the surface quickly accelerate to the same speed as the desk. It's the super thin layer of air that causes the heads to float. They should never actually touch the disk itself. The distance is so small that any visible dust would impact the side of the head without going under it. Even the tobacco smoke you see is probably too big to cause a head crash. It is the superfine particles of smoke that you can't see, for example, the bacon frying in the kitchen. The rule is, if you can smell it, it can crash the drive. When these nearly invisible particles slip between the head and the disk surface they are almost instantly burned to a crisp. The burned remains get stuck to the head. With a small microscope, or a good jewelers Lupe, they appear as black streaks on the head. You won't be able to see them on the platter. They will be spread too thin to be visible. If there is enough contaminants the burned remains will build up and alter the airfoil of the head. It's a lot like trying to water ski when the bottom of your skis are covered in barnacles. The head stops flying, contacts the disk and bounces along leaving a trail of dents and scratches in the dish. Eventually the track turns into grooves that you can actually feel. The disk heads are usually ceramic. They are so hard that the contact with the metal desk and the bouncing action will remove all the burnt contaminant. Sometimes the head regains its flight characteristics and you can use it to recover data from the undamaged part of the disk. How to avoid having your head get stuck. During a normal power down the heads are retracted completely off the desk where they encounter little ramps that spread them apart so that when they are loaded again they don't hit the edge of the spinning disc. Stuck heads are usually caused by a power failure. If the head is near the center of the desk and the drive detects the power going down, it retracts the heads and attempts to park them. If there's insufficient power they may not make it to the top of the ramps. They slide back down and move out onto the disk which is slowing down. The flow of air that keeps the disk flying gets thinner and thinner. When the head comes to a stop there's no air trapped under it. It's almost like a vacuum or a suction cup. The technical term is stiction. This is why shaking the drive in a rotary motion to rotate the platters allows the head to move. It it's the same principle as sliding a suction cup along a smooth surface rather than trying to pull it straight away. You can avoid stiction by making sure your power supply has enough reserve capacity to allow the heads to retract completely up on the ramps when they are parked. Avoid adding too many drives or drives that require more power to your desktop without verifying that the power supply can handle them. Avoid the use of "Y"cables and extension cables for the power supplying your drives. For laptops, be sure they shut down while the battery is still above 10 or 20% of its capacity. Replace older laptop batteries that may not be putting out full voltage. Building some sort of box to prevent dust from getting into your drive is a bad idea. Paper dust, cardboard dust, sawdust or just plain dust will collect on the surfaces of the box. Bumping the box will shake the dust loose. Unless you have a very large and expensive HEPA filter, the box may actually make things worse. Instead: Never work on a drive when you have a cold. Don't sneeze on it, don't blow on it, don't use compressed air on it. Wait a couple hours after smoking or preparing a meal. Wash your hands. Don't lean over and the drive. About the only clean room supplies you really need is a cheap surgeon's mask to keep you from breathing on the surface. One last note. Once a head has gotten stuck, it's a sure bet it will happen again. Replace the drive. Congratulations Matt: excellent video. Since you did such a good job of explaining head stiction in layman terms, even though you said you had no real experience or training, I wanted to let you know you did a great job. I also thought it would be worth my effort to pass on some of my training and years of experience. My hope is you'll keep up the good work. If you ever decide to redo that video, I'm sure it'll be even better. I used Dragon speak, I didn't bother to correct its mistakes, so don't blame me.
cool story bro. but here in the present u dont need all that explanation since we have SSD! thank god for SSD or i have to read ur long ass fucking ass comment ;). get urselves a fucking SSD and u dont ever have to fuck arounnd again :)
YOU ARE A LIFE SAVER. I have been suffering from anxiety because of our hard drive. We waited and searched for months as to what we could do but all we found is to spend $1500 with an uncertainty that files won't be recovered. Last night we took a leap of faith to do this and we were screaming because it worked! Thank you for your help!!!
This just shows how much those companies are overpricing their services. Prices are not established based on what it really costs but on what customers are ready to pay.
@@MoRoarSport-VintageRacing1 Actually, you are wrong. The reason the industry charges what it does is due to the price of the tools and the cost of education. I have a small data recovery business and do this professionally. I have spent well over $100K in education and equipment. I can assure you that this guy has NO FUCKING IDEA what he is doing. The odds of being able to recover your data using this method, EXTREMELY LOW. Odds of another data recovery company being able to recover your data after you tried to DIY it and made a mistake, close to impossible.
Thanks for this very useful video! As I was an engineer for WD, here are some responses to common comments from below: [1] Yes, opening the drive IS a _Last_Resort_ , giving you a chance to recover your data. You shouldn't expect the drive to survive indefinitely after "the operation". Opening the drive does let in contaminants, and since the heads fly at about 1nm from the surface of the disc, there is the probability of surface damage over time. Even with the filter, the winds in the drive will knock debris loose from the filter now and then. It is also because the fly-height is so small, that the heads & media must be so darn smooth that if the disc stops (stopping the airflow under the heads), the heads will likely WELD themselves to the surface. The media surface has many layers, including protective and "smoothing" upper layers, which likely suffer damage when the heads are un-stuck. Thus, though the data may be readable, that spot on the media becomes abrasive, the scab can grow, and is prone to failure. So get your data off quick! :-) [2] Removal & replacement of the discs themselves (say, for a busted motor) is impractical, save for experts, thus for very valuable data only. The drive they go in would have to be identical, and the parameters for head amplifier tuning would have to be transplanted to the drive's firmware with custom (factory) tools. Even so, the tracks on each disc would be very likely off-center, necessitating servo to track aggressively. If the data could be read, it's likely it would be with many soft-errors, many retries. [3] The drive firmware DOES try its best to make due, despite difficulties. Error correction codes are pretty good in modern drives, and drives expect to handle sectors which go bad, and replace them from a pool of backup good sectors. Error recovery algorithms are elaborate, and don't easily give-up. [4] Very minor criticism of video: Tapping the drive is less likely to un-stick the heads vs. rotating the drive. Because the head assembly is very finely balanced (keeps head seeks from shaking the drive), a linear shock (perpendicular to the head assembly axis-of-rotation) is unlikely to put an appreciable force on the actual head. Rotation, however, can work. As suddenly as you can, rotate the drive within the plane of it's discs. Both the media and heads will experience rotational forces. [5] Some older discs of 20 years ago parked their heads on the media, in a laser-textured (for non-stick) landing zone area at the inner diameter. Even these could sometimes stick, and needed a rotation to get them loose. Modern drives park their heads on a plastic ramp (orange, in the video), which also frees up more media area for data. [6] It's worth noting that some high performance, high capacity drives are helium-filled (better aerodynamics & heat-transfer characteristics). These drives are mostly welded closed to keep the helium in. Clearly, this wouldn't be for one of those drives. * Finally, to repeat: this is a last resort for data recovery. Don't expect your drive to be anywhere near reliable after this procedure. Count yourself lucky if it works for long enough to get your data off. :-) Thanks again DIY Perks for this very useful video! :-)
Great comments! A lesser known trick; keeping the hard drive in a freezer for a while (sealed in a freezer bag) will allow you to recover some data for a few minutes before the drive heats up again and re-sticks.
Keep in mind most of these people don't know a 1nm from a hole in the ground. Servo will be cleared out in a matter of a few ns with a piece of dust (average size ~ 500 nm)
I hope you are reaping some serious rewards in monetising your knowledge this way. Not only are you intelligent, practically minded and clearly spoken, you have a pleasant non arrogant disposition so lacking amongst many of your peers and you make it an enjoyable experience learning from you. And after 20 years of self taught fumbling, you reveal such secrets and insights that would have saved me many hours and hopefully will in future. Big respect my good man. Best wishes.
Been working on computers for over 25 years and this is the 1st time I've seen this trick. Tried it successfully on a damaged 3TB HDD. This comes to prove that and ol' dog in fact can learn new tricks! :D :D Good video!
I've been working on PCs since Windows 3.1 as well. I never tried to open a hard drive because of all the scare stories about getting dust in the enclosure and ruining it. I can't be the only person who has worked on computers for decades and cringed watching him pop that hard drive chassis without a clean room environment! I won't be as afraid to try it now though, if I really need to that is. Good video. 😁👍
Just a reminder...If after opening the drive and successfully accessing the data...get all your data on another storage drive and never use the broken drive ever. Otherwise, you'll risk losing more data in the future. Great video Matt!!
@@typingcat I wouldn't. The read write head passes over the disk at a distance of about a hundred atoms while the disk itself spins at several thousand RPM. If even a single mote of dust were to collide with the head it could destroy the entire read write head assembly and possibly irreparably damage the disk itself. The only way I'd be comfortable using a reassembled disk would be if the disk were repaired in a JPL cleanroom.
There is a chance those damaged sectors were caused by dust particles. I recently tried just opening and closing a hard drive that was perfectly working but no longer had any important data on it, and that alone managed to screw up one or two sectors in the partition table (probably the worst place for it to happen, though recoverable). I would definitely recommend using a clean air enclosure like the DIY one on this channel, I'm building one right now before I do this on an actual stuck drive.
The first video I saw like this a guy worked on the hard drive inside a bubble with some sort of air filter running. I don't seem to be able to locate it any longer.
For those of you who might try this or try transplanting the platters, it often works as a last ditch means of recovering data. But *don’t ever return a drive that you’ve opened, back to service* - it’s an absolute guarantee that you have introduced particle matter into the drive and this can cause cumulative damage over time until the platter or the head fail fully. It’s like having just a little bit of sand in your transmission… You can be virtually guaranteed that if he ran this test on this drive under normal use on a daily or weekly basis, that there is a significant chance that he would see progressive drive failure over a short period of time and it’s a huge gamble that those gradual failures might cost some valuable data or cause a complete system or total drive failure. This definitely works to recover some data, after which it’s time to drill/hammer the drive and toss!
I've gotten sand in my transmission I was changing the fluid and I had the pan off and a big gust of wind came and blew leaves and dirt a few twigs on to the exposed valve body of the transmission. I hosed it down with diesel fuel to clean it. It was good times.
The internet is a treasure trove. Got my HDD up and running after 6 years. Exact same issue and my hard drive was a 2007 model and was powered. The minute I fixed it, HDD came back to life in a jiffy. Coming to think of it, I could've actually done it 6 years ago had I searched better. The video just came up in my recommendations. Thankful to UA-cam for the first time. Thank you for this video.
Wow this worked for me. I had exactly the same problem - turned out the head was jammed. I dropped my hard drive from my desk and it stopped mounting entirely. Followed this tutorial and my hard drive mounted for the first time in months - I managed to recover all 6,000 files I thought I'd lost. Thank you so much! Buy a cheap multi-set of Torx screwdrivers (one of them will work)
After many years my faithful DVD/HDD recorder finally gave up the ghost - or so I thought. All I could get from it was a physical clicking noise from the hard drive. Having watched quite a few rescue videos, I was loath to open the drive so eventually, I came across this video with its initial suggestion to tap/gently hit the edge of the housing as shown in the video. After a couple of goes, hey presto....the HD lives again, magic! Thank you so much. (In case anyone needs to know, the internal drive is a WD 1600BB from a Panasonic HDD/DVD recorder).
I dropped my external HDD, searched any videos available and stumbled to this one, and conclude this is the case for me, I pry open mine and the needle is also stucked on the platter I followed what he did in the video and luckily I recovered my data. This video really helps, games and porn recovered lol
This is a life saver... my brother and I repaired his external harddisk which contains more than 500gb worth of data on a 1tb Seagate and it worked! We tried to bring it first to a local repair shop but they told us that they couldn't fix it and recommended us to try to opt for a larger company that charges roughly around $1k to restore lost data... thank goodness for this vid we were able to repair the data in the storage ourselves.. just advice for others who will try, make sure to follow the steps carefully and make sure not to get any dust on the disk itself. After that, transfer all of your data into your computer or a different storage device. This is a life saver! Thank you so much for sharing this information @DIY Perks!
Excellent video! Also worth mentioning: NEVER touch the disk platter with your fingers or anything; the skin oils (or even tiny scratches) are likely to damage that touched spot, losing that data-- which can possibly amount to megabytes of stuff! Another point worth mentioning: Before commencing a drive salvation project like this, vacuum the desktop area first to rid the region of stray dust and particles, and also wear a face mask to help prevent a stray spittle from landing on the disk platter (for the same reasons described above.)
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Wow! it works... My hard drive works after giving up on 1TB of data. I hit it side ways on hard surface nothing happened. I then hit it sideways on my palm and the baby just spin.. Thanks so much man. Where was this video in the last 7 years... could have saved a lot of drives.
I just saved my drive using this method ... a HUGE THANK YOU DIY Perks, attempted first to build a clean chamber inside a box i broke by mistake, and fed up with all this and motivated mostly by your video i decided to give it a go in my room with bare hands, head was stuck, replaced it with a toothpick + screwdriver on the center going counterclockwise ... just had a piece of dust on the platter that i blowed gently but firmly ... it turned on, MOUNTED and i'm now retrieving all my precious life data :D THANK YOU AGAIN MATE I OWE YOU !
OH MY GOD !!! Thank you SO much for this video !!! I had a hard drive that crashed 7 years ago, I never threw it away because it had a lot of great memories in it and I always hoped it would one day work again. And thanks to you it does ! You can't imagine how great it feels and how exited I am !!! Once again thank you so so much !!!
Before you fixed it what type of sound was the drive giving? My Buffalo external hard drive which stands up vertically fell over and now makes a clicking sound, this was a few years ago probably about 7 too!. I've just got a quote from a company and they are quoting me £500, it has a lot of picture memories on it but £500 is a lot of money!
I like your presentation, patience and also the way, you have generated hope for recovery of data from the old drive. One more additional point is sometimes when the drive is considered safe, packed and left in archive as back up and connected after 3-4 yrs , it not working , when we need really a kind of good power supply and clean up. The rusting due to oxidation, which is not visible locks the movable parts and this makes drive non functional and it requires a head assembly to be examined properly. Great video.
I can't express in words how much I love you for this... I went to a recovery data center and they were gonna charge me 800€+.. I saw your video and luckily I got the same problem as you, and in less than half an hour doing what you advised, I am now recovering my info successfully! Thank you very much
DIY Perks Hi, I have a 250GB WD 3.5" HDD that doesn't have that issue shown on here, but it does turn on and sounds like it starts spinning but after 0.8-1.3 seconds when it reach certain speed it start clicking and do it for 3-4 times, then it sounds like it completely turn off. Contingently, Anandtech made an experiment more than year ago using the exact same HDD and with exactly the same problem as mine, the author tried to do an plate(s) transplant and failed at it, after that I feared to try it myself and kept the HDD for when I can afford the data recovery, you you think it would work for me? Thank you. EDIT: I found the article, mine is the one with the black case. www.anandtech.com/show/7330/hardware-tricks-how-to-not-fix-a-crashed-hard-drive
What did you end up doing? My Buffalo external hard drive which stands up vertically fell over and now makes a clicking sound, this was a few years ago. I've just got a quote from a company and they are quoting me £500, it has a lot of picture memories on it but £500 is a lot of money!
I cannot thank you enough, I just did what you committed in the video and the harddrive works now, I managed to recover all the important files lost for two and a half year. I always been told the harddrive is going to explode (exaggeration) if I ever open it in a dusty environment but it works just fine now! And it has run for several hours and still running! Thanks again
Kakarot1994 He said it was Torx screwdriver size T6, they are cheap just go to a store that sells screwdrivers and pick one up for 5 euros or something, optionally take your harddrive with you and try the various ones out
This method worked for me! I had thrown a fatal blow upon my laptop, in a fit of frustration, and the HDD started clicking and everything froze. I brought it to Best Buy, and a member of the Geek Squad said it would be a minimum of $300, and upwards of $1200 to recover any data from the HDD. At that time, the HDD was not detected in the BIOS. I took it back home with me, and read many online forums about the subject and most outcomes did not look promising. I found this fantastic clip online and decided to roll the dice, and great success! Thank you my friend. You saved me a bundle! Now, to sign up for some anger management sessions.
@@thespacemanfil Saved one out of, I think it was three I tried to fix. Wasn't the one I would have really liked to have saved, but still, better than nothing, and it is still working now.
Hi! My friend's Western Digital Elements 500gb hard drive fell from a height of about 4 and a half feet, and she had no backups of all the photos she stored in that drive. Thanks to your video, I was able to open the drive, return the spindle back to its parking mode, and after assembling the cover again, managed to start up the drive and recover all the data within. Saved her lots of money in the process. Thanks for the helpful video!
Before you fixed it what type of sound was the drive giving? My Buffalo external hard drive which stands up vertically fell over and now makes a clicking sound, this was a few years ago. I've just got a quote from a company and they are quoting me £500, it has a lot of picture memories on it but £500 is a lot of money!
I owe you so much for this video. I stupidly had 2 months of school work, hundreds of hours of work, all stored on one hard drive. I thought it was all gone, including term end projects, side projects and everything else there is. I tried everything and I found your video. It gave me hope that taking it apart was the best choice. Upon inspection, I had the same problem as you and I was able to reverse the problem. Booted it up, backed up everything and everything was back. I was honestly in a state of depression and stress over losing my drive. One thing to note, we both had Seagate hard drives. I am sticking to WD in the future as my other hard drive has seen much worse and the only thing to go was the USB cable. Seagate drives aren't reliable in my mind and I will not be trusting my important files on one. The drive I just fixed has been retired to a back up drive inside my computer which I will be backing up my work to every night. I'm considering online storage since hard drives can be so delicate at times.
Seagate's reliability is down ever since they bought Maxtor -- the HD maker that went bankrupt because all the crappy hard drive they were producing. The most reliable ranking used to be Hitachi, WD, then Seagate. WD has since acquired Hitachi -- hopefully the Hitachi brand HD reliability is not affected. Online storage is a good idea. I told my sister to back up her stuff online but she didn't and then her drive crashed about a couple years ago -- I was able to recover 95% of her files (lucky the drive failed in a non-dramatic fashion), now she backs up her files. I got another sister who also don't back up her files as I suggested. I will just have to wait for her to lose her files before she would learn I suppose.
***** I agree totally. Only use the best, most reliable, least used drive as a backup, not a drive that could fail at any time. For really important data, do a second backup on alternate days such as Monday and Thursday. At home I use an external drive to back up everything I have created since the last external backup and USB drives to backup newly created work in addition to the work saved on hard drive. So I usually end up with 3 copies of the files. Overkill, perhaps but I haven't lost anything for many years. Old drives (1990's) used to last 10 years and have deteriorated after 2000, so now it's not uncommon to have one fail after 3 years. CD's/DVDs are not good for long term storage because of disk rot. Some micro SD cards recently failed. The original promise of computer data storage being for ever has not been realised.
Thank you sooo much! You saved me a fortune! Your instructions worked perfectly on a 4TB external 2,5" Seagate HDD, after unstucking the head I could copy the whole drive to a new one without any issues and restore months of unretrievable work!
Dude, thank you! My external HDD (STEA2000400) suddenly stopped working and was not recognized by any computer or Win/Lin OS, not even through a powered SATA/USB adapter. I followed your tutorial and it worked! I was able to save all my data! I really appreciate what you've done. Seagate had referred me to their data recovery partner service that wanted to charge me ~$650 USD. I'm glad I found your channel! Keep up the great work! Cheers!
Don't let this detract from the importance of backups. My hard drive failed last month and let's just say I would not be here today if I didn't have backups Ironically, the reason I'm watching this video is because I'd like to recover the little bit of data I hadn't backed up for lack of space...
This was a really interesting video and I can't believe the disk still worked afterwards! A couple of tips though. You can actually create a temporary cleanroom environment in your own bathroom by running the shower really hot so that the room fills with steam and then turning the shower off and letting the steam settle. The steam condenses on all the little particles of dust and they fall to the floor leaving the air completely free of dust. Then you can open your hard drive with less worry about particles landing on the platter. Also you can buy a little comb shaped tool especially for lifting up the multiple heads off the platter all at once and then you can move them off the disk without dragging them across the surface causing damage.
You marvellous marvellous man. I have been repairing computers for 10 years and was always afraid to take a hard disk to bits. Completely swallowed the clean room myth. You have changed my life. You plucky genius, you
YES THANK YOU..BY YOUR TAPPING IT ON A HARD SURFACE AS SEEN ON YOUR VIDEO...THE COVER LESS LAPTOP EXT HARD DRIVE STARTED TO WORK AND FILES WERE OK..SO I DIDNT HAVE TO OPEN IT UP..THANK YOU..EASY METHOD EXPLAINED SO WELL...
Keep in mind that you probably would not be able to do this with some of the newer hard drives (especially the higher capacity ones). That is due to the hard drives being filled with Helium these days instead of air to reduce drag on the platters inside.
Hello.First of all, thank you so so so much from Turkey! You clearly made my day. Thanks to you I saved my entire picture album and data, and also money. My WD 1tb external hard drive disk was damaged and could not be detected by my and my wife’s computer. I sent it to a computer technician and he told me that he replaced the board of it but it did not work. And recommended me to sent the disk to a data recovery company. However, I saw your video and decided to apply it. Despite the fact that my hard drive head was not in the middle of the platter and it was in its original place, I moved it forward and back. After I mounted all the pieces back (with the hard drive head on its original place), I connected it to my computer and it worked like a charm. And a copule of minutes ago, I copied all my data to my computer from the external hard drive. It is still working. Thank you so much again. I will recommend this vidoe to my friends and share it on facebook and other favorite websites.
selamlar *****. benim gönderdiğim bilgisayarcı benim disk için "kafa atıyor" demişti. aynı şey midir bilemem. yandı derken board'u yandıysa 30-40 TL'ye değiştiriyorlar sanırım. Benimkini değiştirmişti ama bir işe yaramadı. Ben de o kadar para vermek istemiyordum ve bir şey yapmadan kenara da atmak istemedim. Sonuçta, madem o kadar para vermen imkansız, o riski almaya değer. Sonuçta o parayı veremeyeceksen zaten hard disk senin için ölmüş demektir. Onun yerine içini açıp gösterdiği gibi hdd başını oynatmak senin için bir şans olacaktır. Yalnız şöyle bir durum var, ben bilgileri kurtardıktan sonra hdd'yi yeniden taktım bu sefer çalışmadı. Dolayısıyla, hdd'yi çalıştırabilirsen zaman kaybetmeden tüm bilgilerini kurtarmanı tavsiye ederim.
+mustpunk Just finished watching the video - and your additional experience gives me added confidence in my upcoming attempt. Good to hear the method worked for you. Hoping for a similiar success. Cheers.
+SilentKnight43 Did it work? I'm in the same situation just about to start doing surgery to my 1TB seagate drive .. I'm very nervous and could really use some advice if it did work .. cheers
Dude! Holy shit, I can't thank you enough. My external 2,5" HDD had a Headcrash and the german companies for Data-recovery offered to rescue my data for only 600€. No joke! Then I came across your tutorial and it worked absolutely fine. Thank you so much. Ben
Hello, I would recommend lowering the hard drive temperature to 5-6 ° C (41-42 ° F) before moving the playhead. Due to thermal expansion the read head should be easier to move. Sometimes even the simple fact of lowering the temperature makes it possible to recover the disc without opening it. You can do this by putting the disc in the vegetable compartment of your refrigerator (10 min). And / Or put a tupperware on your disc with water and ice cubes (the water will remain at 0 ° C (32 ° F) as long as there are ice cubes) only when it is in operation because be careful, the temperature of the disc must not drop below 5 ° C (41 ° F).
Oh my goodness you are a lifesaver. I just followed your instructions and saved all my files. I cannot thank you enough. Greetings and heartfelt gratitude from South Africa, Bel :)
If you want to minimize dust exposure, set up your workspace on the counter in a bathroom. Run a hot shower for a few minutes and then wait for the steam to dissipate. Dont open the door or move around too much. You will have 10-20 minutes of a relatively dust free workspace.
@@tomkarlsborn2384 not really i tied to put a hdd ona a freezer for 12 hrs just to make it work. and when I try to plug it in it still works and reading my hdd, tho I cant acces the drive because thats the main reason I put it in the feezer because of the hdd health is 3% and cant load the fles in it but still reading the hdd well.
@@tomkarlsborn2384 It's a bit counter-intuitive but makes sense to me. The steam is the liquid moisture in the air transforming into gas which is called evaporation, right? While the steam is present, sure, not a good idea. It means there is still plenty of moisture that hasn't been transformed to gas. But once you stop running the water and the steam is gone after a few minutes, you actually have a time window where the air will now be dryer than before, because of that evaporation. A clothes iron demonstrates this process in a far quicker space of time, literally seconds. The iron is pressed against the clothes, some steam is released, the clothes can get a little wet but then with the heat the moisture transforms to gas, and in no time at all the clothes are dryer than they were before, as well as creaseless. For a longer time period example, try to think of the weather and times when you have been in a very humid location, really feeling that energy-draining humidity, and then it has finally rained, and a few hours after the air is lovely and drier than before. As for the dust - the water content earlier will have collected and carried a good amount of it down to the floor where it will stick and sit for a while (if you don't move around much later), similar to the ancient method of sprinkling water on floors prior to dusting. At least, in theory. :)
THANK YOU FOR THIS VIDEO!! I backed up all of my laptop's data to an external hard drive in preparation of reformatting, and then after I reformatted the laptop, I DROPPED the hard drive and it stopped working! I was so upset, but came across this video, bought the proper size screwdriver, and a few days later was able to repair the hard drive and recover all of my data! It was exactly this issue. You're a lifesaver!!!
Holy s**t, it actually worked for me!!! The guy had said it would cost a minimum of 8000 Indian rupees and that too outside my home state said there was no chance for the disk. This is perfect. I can't thank you enough man!!!
Dear, sir! Thank you, so very very much for your excellent instruction on how to repair a problematic hard drive disk! Really appreciating your language too! Clear and caring! Wishing you, sir, all the very best, always! Best Regards, from Sweden! Stay safe and healthy, in these perilous pandemic days!
Holy cow! I have discarded many dead drives in my day that were "unrecoverable". One of my clients had a 500GB Seagate drive with client tax data that they had not backed up and it was humming. Before finding your video this is not something I would have ever dared. However, I successfully "unstuck" the read/write head, spun up the drive and recovered several years of tax data for them. Thanks SO MUCH for your video!
Quite literally saved my 4TB drive, it made the click of death initially and was unable to be detected by my computer. However after finding your video, the bump method managed to pull the needle out and let me pull data off of it before retiring the drive forever. Thank you so much!
Before you attempt banging the drive against a solid surface, first try the centripetal force method. 1. Hold the hard drive in your hand with the side of the drive facing the ground (or outward). 2. Fully extend your arm and keep it extended. 3. Raise your arm in the air (keep the side of the drive facing down). 4. While keeping your arm extended, swing your arm toward the floor. This accomplishes the same thing as tapping or banging the drive on hard surface without the major jolt or vibration. It's a more subtle approach to accomplish the same task.
I was so bummed, my western digital My Passport external drive got knocked over....i found it on the floor, and plugging it in, it only whirred, 4 terabytes of all my music, so i saw your post, hoping against hope, and ...... it worked. omg, it worked. Thank you from the bottom of my heart....this is one of those things that if i lost, i would feel less than whole. First world problem, yes, but all the same, joyous and grateful.
@@wmtodd8249 Glad it worked out for you. Please note that these external USB drives are typically made with the cheapest parts available to the manufacturer. They tend to fail much more often than the hard drives you'd install into a computer. That said, copy your data from this drive onto a new one. Also, you can buy an internal hard disk drive (the type you install inside of a PC) and a hard disk enclosure that has USB ports on it. This provides you a hard drive that has a higher (but not immortal) life expectancy. 3.5" drives will require an external power supply but are typically more reliable than 2.5" drives that will get power from the USB port (no external power supply required). Either way, building your own external USB drive using an drive designed for internal use will be more reliable in the long run. Online storage is cheap now days. Check out backblaze.com for a cheap method to backup all of your data.
@@kenteague6542 Thank you for this info as well, it pretty much answers and confirms any questions i had about the nature of those "convenient" portables. And for gravity challenged dorks such as I (I drop things), until some electromagnetic field that buffers and cancels out a harsh fall gets built into these things, and protected enough that all that electromagnetic energy won't wipe out all the memory on it, (in other words not in our lifetimes if ever, lol), i seriously need to practice the precautionary measures you mention, SSDs are coming down in price, too.... using those in the enclosures you mention, that's got to be an added bonus, but here i shaddup, and check out the link you posted, thank you sir....
Thank you so much DIY Perks. You would be surprised how this video resolved my issue by accident. I was looking for a solution for "Boot Device Not Found" Error and tried all available on Google & UA-cam but could't find a solution. Finally, as i was about to give up while i let UA-cam play on my other computer. Guess what? God is great, auto play brought u to my screen. First i never thought it was gonna work but i gave u the benefit of the doubt and tried your method as a last resort. Guess what? It was the same problem as on your video and used the same Technic, and now IT WORKS. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK U SO MUCH. I did it for the first time and now i learn a new thing thanks to u.
beruu berd really? my Dell is doing same thing today I should give it a try then. I pulled out the hard drive but didn't open it further. I will take my chances now. tks for sharing the success.
lol. you sound like me. i've had this video #1 on my watch later list AND my (clicking external) hard drive right there for months now. i just have this feeling like... it's not gonna work. so i delay and procrastinate (all the time) in giving it a try. but i will, dammit. i will! BUT, i must say the 'dislikes' 700 to 'likes' 28,000 fills me with a little optimism. and the dude seems affable, personable, reasonably intelligent and that's gotta count for something... so, did yours work? wait, don't tell me! ...actually, yeah. tell me.
Found this by accident. Pleasantly shocked. They said it couldn't be done. Resisted the temptation to read all 7000 comments. Life is good and so are you.
OMG. Thank you so much. I have a 2.5 inch 1 TB portable hard drive similar to yours. In 2012, as I was backing up photos and videos from my trip onto it, it fell off the top of a computer just about 2 feet off the ground and hit the hard floor and stopped working ever since. When I plugged it into the computer, the light on the drive would light up but would die after about a minute and no drive letter showed up on the computer. I tried everything (minus opening it up because I was afraid I would get dust on it and ruin it) I could to fix the problem to no avail. I called a few places to see if they can recover the data but they said it would cost $500 or more and there's no guarantee all my data would be recovered. The drive has been sitting on the shelf for 7 years. Today, after seeing your video, I thought I'd give it another look. I opened it up and to my surprise, the drive head is also in the middle of the platter not parked. I did exactly what you did step by step and it's now working! It's been 7 years now and I finally got my precious videos and photos back. Thank you so much!
Hi Matt: I've never taken a hard drive apart because I was taught in college that it will die once exposed to dust. But from my textbook, here is the section that explains what can happen if you open one up: A traditional hard disk drive (HDD) is composed of individual disks, or platters, with read/write heads on actuator arms controlled by a servo motor-all contained in a sealed case that prevents contamination by outside air. The aluminum platters are coated with a magnetic medium. Two tiny read/write heads service each platter, one to read the top and the other to read the bottom of the platter. The coating on the platters is phenomenally smooth. It has to be, as the read/write heads actually float on a cushion of air above the platters, which spin at speeds between 3500 and 10,000 rpm. The distance (flying height) between the heads and the disk surface is less than the thickness of a fingerprint. The closer the read/write heads are to the platter, the more densely the data packs onto the drive. These infinitesimal tolerances demand that the platters never be exposed to outside air. Even a tiny dust particle on a platter would act like a mountain in the way of the read/write heads and would cause catastrophic damage to the drive. To keep the air clean inside the drive, all hard drives use a tiny, heavily filtered aperture to keep the air pressure equalized between the interior and the exterior of the drive.
OMG Someone finally said it! Opening a hard drive up and exposing the Platters is bad. That is why they build hard drives in dust "proof" rooms...I was going to say, this is very bad and you put your hard drive at a much higher risk of corrupting it more or killing it.
I think that he was pretty clear that this is a last resort type effort where the only other option is to throw it in the garbage because you can't afford or the data is not worth employing a data recovery service. He also advises copying the recovered data to a good drive and considering the old drive as damaged. What else do you want from him?
Yes, HDDs are barometrically sealed. And yes, a single invisible speck of dust or moisture can "damage" data integrity. It can interfere mechanically with moving micron-scale tolerances. It can interfere magnetically (and "stick" to the heads) if it carries any electrical valence. On the plus side, few dust particles floating around a typical home/workshop are going to be composed of ferromagnetic elements. And today's HDD mechanisms are indeed far more robust than their ancient IBM-era forebears. The platter media have greater data persistence, the motors and heads have finer resolutions, the controllers run layers of real-time error-correction. I would never blow directly onto an exposed HDD platter! That would deposit more problems than it blows away. As a warranty-void emergency data recovery repair this approach is worth a shot, and it works more often than no attempt at all, but I wouldn't consider the HDD "reliable" anymore, I'd copy the data off it and onto another drive. It already failed once before, even ignoring any damage caused by the "repair" attempt. You can't really condemn this video, though. DIY low-cost full data recovery (or at least 98% data recovery) from a fully dead HDD ... this time. Although the "professional" data recovery services might condemn it, lol, if it means they have to work with more difficult drives botched up by DIY amateurs.
One of my hard drives got flung off the table while in use about 12 years ago. It was clicking. Just found it again, took it out of its enclosure and connected it. Still clicking. Whacked it gently. It spun right up. Running ddrescue right now at about 40 MB/s :D
Dude, you just saved my digital life! For a combination of reasons, ALL of my precious files were on a laptop HDD in a compact USB enclosure. While connected to my working laptop, the drive accidentally fell, only about 16", down to a carpeted floor, but that was enough to kill it. When I found that it wouldn't spin up I thought for sure it was a goner till I watched your video. With nothing to lose, I opened it up and did exactly what you did - moved the heads off the disc stack and back to the parked position. Reassembled it, fired it up and, PRESTO!, my digital life was restored. Thank you SO MUCH for this video!!
You sir are a legend Thank you your video has saved 300,000 personal photos with your clearly & well explained video in the past I would have thrown the Ext HD away..I can’t thank you enough! Even better I never lost a single photo..
I had the same conversation at the dental hospital with a nurse and student dentist who was anaesthetising my gum prior to a molar removal, but injected directly into the abscess instead. You may well have heard me scream if you live in the North West UK. When I stopped crying (literally tears rolled down my face for a good three minutes) and they had mopped up various antibody pus and blood fluid releases, he was apologising profusely and looked mortified, but when I could speak, I said "Yes, oh my god yes, it's as safe as it could be" which broke the ice with the nurse in attendance, who burst out laughing then proceeded to explain it to the young student dentist. We all gotta learn and I don't bear a grudge. I'm damn sure he won't make that same mistake again at least. It was a character building level of pain so I could kinda sympathise with Dustin and the need for clove oil. I can't imagine a worse method of torture.
Thanks for the tutorial, I was able to repair friend's HDD and get some of the data back for him! He dropped his portable HDD and got the head stuck on the platter but it wasn't as bad as yours.
Great videos! One thing to consider, files aren't necessarily in order on the drive so 2% corruption could affect 100% of files or only 1 file... likely somewhere in between but 2% corruption probably affects more than 2% of files, the larger the average file size the higher the odds more files overlap that 2% corruption
Still useful a decade later! A quick tip to add for clicking drives - make sure they're getting sufficient power (ie not connected to an extension sharing power to other devices) so always try another USB port/device for connecting too! I'm going through a bunch of drives that were thought to be dead on behalf of a friend - turns out, 4/5 were just failing in this way (clicking noise) due to power issues as his PC case ports (not motherboard ports) were connected to a internal splitter and not providing enough power. As for the other one, this method worked great, although would stress its a last resort - its being imaged as I type to an SSD, so fingers crossed it lives long enough to get all the data off.
Tried this, drive no longer made the original sound, but started clicking. Adjusted a little more and it made a much worse screeching sound, I unplugged immediately. Adjusted again, back to clicking. The disc itself is visibly damaged in areas by this point and still not detected. Thankfully, I don't think I had anything TOO important on the drive. It didn't work for me, but thank you anyway for showing an actual tutorial on how to do a DIY fix for this issue unlike everywhere else that says "DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT ATTEMPTING A FIX YOURSELF, PAY A DATA RECOVERY EXPERT, DOWNLOAD SCAM SOFTWARE, OR NOTHING"
This was the most helpful video. Period. This is what enabled me to recover data from a drive everyone else told me was completely dead. Thank you, sir!
you are definitely sent from God almighty. My Hard drive fell down about a month now and i tried all i know. i decide to take a chance and open my western digital like you showed in the video, did it just as you showed. screwed it up back and boom i can access my drive and my info. i amm so so soo grateful for this video. thank you
THIS VIDEO WAS NOT "SOMEWHAT USEFUL" , IT IS A FREAKING LIFE SAVER!! I ALMOST LOST ALL 1TB OF DATA, AND THANK YOU VERY MUCH SIR! I WOULD HUG YOU RIGHT NOW IF YOU WERE HERE
@@TravelingBong Since I live in Germany, I can just give you a rough translation of the buttons you have to press Press windows key + r, then type diskmgmt.msc in the text field (if you're running Windows 7,8,10 then you can also use the windows search instead) Then you will see all the connected drives on the bottom of the disk management tool (the white bars with black or blue stripes). There will probably be a "Drive 0", which is the boot drive. Search for the drive you want to mount to windows (probably "Drive 1" or 2, depending on how many internal drives the computer has). Repeat the following procedure for all the partitions that you damaged drive has: if the partition is highlighted black (if it's already blue, skip this first step), right click on it, select "create" (or "new" or something like that) and then select volume. Then this partition should be highlighted blue. Right click on that and select "assign drive letter" or something similar. In the pop-up, select the drive letter you want to assign to the external drive (e.g. "F:"). Click ok and your drive will likely show up in the windows explorer. Warning: back all the files up and never use the damaged drive again. It will not be reliable.
+PixlSwift It helped you recover the data, which in most cases, is worth more than the actual drive. That 2TB drive is damaged, and very prone to future problems. It's basically junk. So here's what you do next: - Send it back for a warranty if its still covered. Most countries have a minimum 1yr warranty law on sold goods. - If its more than a year, see if you can find the box, as some re-badged drives give you an extended warranty (2+ yrs). If you don't have the box or receipt, see their website. - And if that fails open its casing and look for the Serial Number of the actual drive, and see if it is covered under international warranty for the actual drive from WD etc. - And if that is also expired (old drive!) then you may want to buy a similar drive off the internet, swap them, then claim a new one from the new warranty. It sounds devious but it is ethical and just, since most drive failures are the fault of the manufacturer and not the user. I don't condone you doing this is it is a user fault such as a heavy drop, water damage, magnet damage, static or surge damage. And if you fail to have your money refunded or the goods refurbished, the next best thing would be to use the drive for non-important uses. I recommend plugging it to your TV and playback some movies, or to record Live TV. If the drive fails, you won't be losing precious data, and can watch the video content through other sources.
+Kangal the point is, that the last screw is made under sticker so they can find out if you opened the drive or not, and warranty simply becomes invalid
HELP. What does one do when the only screw turns out to be sealed? Looks like they melted plastic over the screw (or maybe the screw itself is plastic) and there is no way to get a screwdriver on it This is an external DELL/Seagate 2Tb FreeAgent GoFlex made in China.
I have fixed a hard drive by putting it in the freezer. Left it in there for 1hr and 15 minutes then thawed it out for 3 and a half hours. work hard drive went down too so done the same and again it fixed it. Done the same with a virgin modem and it worked. the work hard drive went on for 11 months which was on every day. Not recommended of course but at my own risk..Great video and thanks for uploading
Interesting and presented in a logical straightforward manner. I have the cover of my SCSI drive loosened, and was looking for a technique to free the head. I had heard that it was better to spin the head as you did. So, here I go into the unknown. ( I'm kidding, I have had HDs apart, but never with the intent to get them running).
Wow, in my house, the instant I remove the cover, dust is all over the platter. I am quite impressed how little dust is in your environment - I didn't see a single particle in your video!
Thanks for the video. I'm going to give this a try on two of my oldest data drives that aren't spinning up. Fortunately, I work for a cleanroom certification company and we have many hoods at our facility I can use to perform this method in a "clean" environment.
Just want to say Thank you, your video saved my external hard drive and I successfully recover 99% of my data without cost me a bomb at data recovery service.
Your video is PERFECT!!!! Thank you so much for your great information!!! With your video I have recovered all my data from my hard disk!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!
Omar El-Etr :( I am so sorry Omar!!! to be honest I haven't recovered all the data but only some... but when i have time I want to try with some softwares. Now I have to buy another hard disk. You can try to recover data with EaseUS Recover data. It's a fabulous software.
My Hard Drive doesn't even initialise! It's not recognised by the computer. Consequently, I can't run data recovery programmes like EaseUS (which I've attempted to use but failed) because they don't even recognise the device to recover data from it. When I asked computer technicians, they told me that there's a problem with the media itself, and that's unrecoverable except by data recovery companies which start off by $500, which is insane!
This video saved me $$$$. Geek Squad at Best But couldn't read the hard drive and said they would have to send it out for data recovery which starts at $250 and can go as high as $1000. After watching this video I bought an amazing computer tool kit from Amazon that had everything I needed to take the top off the hard drive (thanks for the tip about the hidden screw). Sure enough the reader was stuck on the table. 5 turns counter clockwise and the reader was seated back in the starting harness. Put the hard drive back in the computer and it's working. Hind sight is 20/20, now backing up my files!!!!! Thank you DIY Perks. So helpful.
Thank you for the help, just fixed my Seagate 1TB which had this problem. Luckily the head was on the very edge of the platter and I was able to pull it off easily. I've got some pointers to share for first timers who might have this problem with the same hard drive as me: - if you hear fast paced beeping (this was my problem), do not try the bashing method. Edit: YOU CAN IF YOU WANT TO, I didn't and fixed it by opening it. - if your hard drive hasnt been fixed in a week or so (if it has the stuck head), it will still work and I would avise you to get it fixed ASAP. - Don't try and force the screws open if you dont have the right screwset/head to open them. - Don't worry about special name brand screwdrivers, you can find a cheap precision set at your local discount centre or dollar store that has a hardware section. (I fixed my hard drive with a DEKTON 31PC screwdriver set) - If you have a precision set that has a magnet inside the screwdriver to hold the screw bits, IT IS OKAY TO USE! When you place the bit inside the magnetic holder, the bit itself does not become magnetised. Small magnets wont affect your hard drive, only the big strong magnets will cause alot of damage - Take your time when opening up your hard drive and stay calm, try not to breathe heavy when you're directly over your open drive. - Keep your hands steady when you're turning the platter and do not do it at an angle. I was lucky that my hard drive head was on the edge of my platter, so the force that might be needed to pull it off will differ, take it easy. - When you move the head, it will most likely spring back into its original place, so give it a little tap or nudge to see if it does, close your drive ASAP when you're satisfied. - Screw everything back in, but dont go over the edge when tightening your screws. - Place your gromits back on the side screws and place it into your hard drive case or on a non metal solid flat surface. - Plug it in and hope for the best. Good luck! Hope this helps! I got all my files successfully off in 30-40 minutes, I had around 40gb of data (around 35,600 files). I have yet to see any files gone corrupt but I will reply to my comment if I do come across them. I would keep this drive as a throw away and buy a new drive, I wouldnt reccomend using the same drive you opened.
+ｏｈ I have a 1TB Seagate (Samsung) external USB 3.0 drive that sounds like it had the same problem .... plug in cable, and you hear a faint rapid beeping sound , for like, 10 beeps..... then silence. Opened the case, and find that they modified the interface to have a USB3 only interface on the drive instead of being SATA. Is this your case? Beeping?
I did everything you said and I had the exact same problem, thanks so much I had so many important files and thought I lost them forever. Seagate wanted me to pay them $600 to send it in and do what you just did. I am so happy you made this video, thanks again man you're awesome.
Nom de dieu ce tuto vient de me sauver la vie ! Un disque WD Mypassport de 4to avait fait une chute d'un mètre sur le sol. Le disque dur claquait un peu et se mettait hors tension. Lorsque j'ai ouvert le disque, la tête de lecture était pourtant bien positionnée, je l'ai volontairement déplacée sur le disque puis remise à sa place et après avoir rebranché le tout, bingo, ça remarche. Merci !
You saved me (at least) $1000 from a data recovery shop!!! Your advice totally worked and I didn’t need a clean room either. Thank you so much for this 🙏
Thank you so much for saving my memories.. I almost lost my daughter's photos n videos in my 1tb Hd. Which is priceless. I follow your guide on the first place, and it works. Thank you..
Dani Maulana hey man , I dropped my laptop and I saw this vid and opened the hdd and it was stuck and made the noise like this one in the vid. I opened it in a very clean room and made the job as quick as possible. Now I have to test it on a working laptop. How did you do it? Can you please help me ? Thank you :)
This is a very cool video. However everyone should realize that it's good to try if you have a large margin for error. IE no critical data on drive. I still recommend professional data recovery service if data is critical.
Hi DIY Perks, thank you very much for this video. Last week I recovered with the help of your video data from a HDD which head crashed 10 years ago. Not only did you save me a lot of money for a professional HDD data recovery, but also almost 3 years of photos (and the memories which come along with them). Here is what I did: 1. The external HDD was making strange intermittend noises and I could not mount it. So I hit it sideways on the table as you suggested and it spun up and I could mount it. 2. Using the Linux command line tool "ddrescue" I copied the hard drive to a new one. Unfortunately the copy was not yet readable, because the file system was compromized. 3. Because the file system was exfat, I couldn't repair the copy under Linux, so I switched to Windows and used the command line tool "chkdsk", which fixed the file system. Now everything works and I am really happy! :-) THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
You'll definitely need this before starting any repair job: amzn.to/2mO5DRB
DIY Perks hi can you help me? my laptop screen went black, no displap no any light coming from screen.
1 month ago i just brought that ! :D
Does it work with an external screen?
DIY Perks hi my hard drive sounds fine however it died and I have a lot of things I don't want to loose on it, is there a way to recover those things off that hard drive?
MrKissekotten Yfghxg
This is a very good video
I have 40 years experience repairing hard drives. My first experience was the 300 MB CDC drives that were the size of a washer or dryer. In those days we used to remove individual heads, clean out a boomerang shaped hole that were used to control the airflow, polish the heads using ordinary typing paper and alcohol and reassemble them. Today the components are too small to even attempt those techniques, however the principles involved remain the same. Your first step where you tap it on the tabletop should actually be the second step. First try holding the drive horizontal to the table so that the internal platters are parallel to the table and rapidly rotate the drive clockwise and counterclockwise with a twist of the wrist. The idea here is that the mass of the platters will cause the platters to remain stationary while the heads and the rest of the drive rotate. Repeating the motion four or five times will unstick the heads from the platter. Power up and see if that worked. If that fails a more drastic action is to tap that on the table as you showed.
About the dust. It's not the dust you have to worry about. It's contaminants. Frying bacon in the kitchen while repairing a drive in the den has caused heads to crash. Working on the drive in high humidity or well it's raining is a problem. Opening a drive that's cold in warm humid air will definitely cause a head crash. Breathing on it is a big no. Really the only mistake you made in this video is telling someone to blow the dust out. Nor should you use any kind of compressed air, unless you have a special compressor with dryers to remove moisture.
When hard drives start they do a purge. That simply means that they spin up and wait briefly for all the dust to be blown off of the desk. In the old days it was a little more complicated than that. Some really old drives ran little brushes in and out of the platters.
When a disk spins the atoms of air closest to the surface quickly accelerate to the same speed as the desk. It's the super thin layer of air that causes the heads to float. They should never actually touch the disk itself. The distance is so small that any visible dust would impact the side of the head without going under it. Even the tobacco smoke you see is probably too big to cause a head crash. It is the superfine particles of smoke that you can't see, for example, the bacon frying in the kitchen. The rule is, if you can smell it, it can crash the drive.
When these nearly invisible particles slip between the head and the disk surface they are almost instantly burned to a crisp. The burned remains get stuck to the head. With a small microscope, or a good jewelers Lupe, they appear as black streaks on the head. You won't be able to see them on the platter. They will be spread too thin to be visible.
If there is enough contaminants the burned remains will build up and alter the airfoil of the head. It's a lot like trying to water ski when the bottom of your skis are covered in barnacles. The head stops flying, contacts the disk and bounces along leaving a trail of dents and scratches in the dish. Eventually the track turns into grooves that you can actually feel. The disk heads are usually ceramic. They are so hard that the contact with the metal desk and the bouncing action will remove all the burnt contaminant. Sometimes the head regains its flight characteristics and you can use it to recover data from the undamaged part of the disk.
How to avoid having your head get stuck.
During a normal power down the heads are retracted completely off the desk where they encounter little ramps that spread them apart so that when they are loaded again they don't hit the edge of the spinning disc.
Stuck heads are usually caused by a power failure. If the head is near the center of the desk and the drive detects the power going down, it retracts the heads and attempts to park them. If there's insufficient power they may not make it to the top of the ramps. They slide back down and move out onto the disk which is slowing down. The flow of air that keeps the disk flying gets thinner and thinner. When the head comes to a stop there's no air trapped under it. It's almost like a vacuum or a suction cup. The technical term is stiction. This is why shaking the drive in a rotary motion to rotate the platters allows the head to move. It it's the same principle as sliding a suction cup along a smooth surface rather than trying to pull it straight away.
You can avoid stiction by making sure your power supply has enough reserve capacity to allow the heads to retract completely up on the ramps when they are parked.
Avoid adding too many drives or drives that require more power to your desktop without verifying that the power supply can handle them.
Avoid the use of "Y"cables and extension cables for the power supplying your drives. For laptops, be sure they shut down while the battery is still above 10 or 20% of its capacity.
Replace older laptop batteries that may not be putting out full voltage.
Building some sort of box to prevent dust from getting into your drive is a bad idea. Paper dust, cardboard dust, sawdust or just plain dust will collect on the surfaces of the box. Bumping the box will shake the dust loose. Unless you have a very large and expensive HEPA filter, the box may actually make things worse.
Instead:
Never work on a drive when you have a cold.
Don't sneeze on it, don't blow on it, don't use compressed air on it. Wait a couple hours after smoking or preparing a meal. Wash your hands. Don't lean over and the drive. About the only clean room supplies you really need is a cheap surgeon's mask to keep you from breathing on the surface.
One last note. Once a head has gotten stuck, it's a sure bet it will happen again. Replace the drive.
Congratulations Matt: excellent video. Since you did such a good job of explaining head stiction in layman terms, even though you said you had no real experience or training, I wanted to let you know you did a great job. I also thought it would be worth my effort to pass on some of my training and years of experience. My hope is you'll keep up the good work. If you ever decide to redo that video, I'm sure it'll be even better.
I used Dragon speak, I didn't bother to correct its mistakes, so don't blame me.
Bob Grosh Thanks very much for sharing your knowledge and experience Bob - I've learnt a lot from what you've written! Cheers!
This guy knows his stuff.
An excellent comment, Bob. I wish more people be like you - knowledgeable and willing to share his experience.
cool story bro. but here in the present u dont need all that explanation since we have SSD! thank god for SSD or i have to read ur long ass fucking ass comment ;). get urselves a fucking SSD and u dont ever have to fuck arounnd again :)
NITECOREPD, you are pathetic :)
YOU ARE A LIFE SAVER. I have been suffering from anxiety because of our hard drive. We waited and searched for months as to what we could do but all we found is to spend $1500 with an uncertainty that files won't be recovered. Last night we took a leap of faith to do this and we were screaming because it worked! Thank you for your help!!!
Hi,
What was the problem
With your hard drive ?
I’m considering doing this as I’m not willing to pay 1900AUD.
Thanks
This just shows how much those companies are overpricing their services. Prices are not established based on what it really costs but on what customers are ready to pay.
Please if your data is critical do not attempt to recover it yourself, unless you are very experienced.
@@MoRoarSport-VintageRacing1 Actually, you are wrong. The reason the industry charges what it does is due to the price of the tools and the cost of education. I have a small data recovery business and do this professionally. I have spent well over $100K in education and equipment. I can assure you that this guy has NO FUCKING IDEA what he is doing. The odds of being able to recover your data using this method, EXTREMELY LOW. Odds of another data recovery company being able to recover your data after you tried to DIY it and made a mistake, close to impossible.
@@QuasiDude data recovery isn't always that easy though.
Thanks for this very useful video! As I was an engineer for WD, here are some responses to common comments from below:
[1] Yes, opening the drive IS a _Last_Resort_ , giving you a chance to recover your data. You shouldn't expect the drive to survive indefinitely after "the operation". Opening the drive does let in contaminants, and since the heads fly at about 1nm from the surface of the disc, there is the probability of surface damage over time. Even with the filter, the winds in the drive will knock debris loose from the filter now and then. It is also because the fly-height is so small, that the heads & media must be so darn smooth that if the disc stops (stopping the airflow under the heads), the heads will likely WELD themselves to the surface. The media surface has many layers, including protective and "smoothing" upper layers, which likely suffer damage when the heads are un-stuck. Thus, though the data may be readable, that spot on the media becomes abrasive, the scab can grow, and is prone to failure. So get your data off quick! :-)
[2] Removal & replacement of the discs themselves (say, for a busted motor) is impractical, save for experts, thus for very valuable data only. The drive they go in would have to be identical, and the parameters for head amplifier tuning would have to be transplanted to the drive's firmware with custom (factory) tools. Even so, the tracks on each disc would be very likely off-center, necessitating servo to track aggressively. If the data could be read, it's likely it would be with many soft-errors, many retries.
[3] The drive firmware DOES try its best to make due, despite difficulties. Error correction codes are pretty good in modern drives, and drives expect to handle sectors which go bad, and replace them from a pool of backup good sectors. Error recovery algorithms are elaborate, and don't easily give-up.
[4] Very minor criticism of video: Tapping the drive is less likely to un-stick the heads vs. rotating the drive. Because the head assembly is very finely balanced (keeps head seeks from shaking the drive), a linear shock (perpendicular to the head assembly axis-of-rotation) is unlikely to put an appreciable force on the actual head. Rotation, however, can work. As suddenly as you can, rotate the drive within the plane of it's discs. Both the media and heads will experience rotational forces.
[5] Some older discs of 20 years ago parked their heads on the media, in a laser-textured (for non-stick) landing zone area at the inner diameter. Even these could sometimes stick, and needed a rotation to get them loose. Modern drives park their heads on a plastic ramp (orange, in the video), which also frees up more media area for data.
[6] It's worth noting that some high performance, high capacity drives are helium-filled (better aerodynamics & heat-transfer characteristics). These drives are mostly welded closed to keep the helium in. Clearly, this wouldn't be for one of those drives.
* Finally, to repeat: this is a last resort for data recovery. Don't expect your drive to be anywhere near reliable after this procedure. Count yourself lucky if it works for long enough to get your data off. :-)
Thanks again DIY Perks for this very useful video! :-)
Paul Kooros if there is a line in the disk caused by the spindle will I be able to recover data?
Great comments!
A lesser known trick; keeping the hard drive in a freezer for a while (sealed in a freezer bag) will allow you to recover some data for a few minutes before the drive heats up again and re-sticks.
Paul Kooros l
@@haywoodjablome440 yes, much better to try this first. Thank you.
Keep in mind most of these people don't know a 1nm from a hole in the ground. Servo will be cleared out in a matter of a few ns with a piece of dust (average size ~ 500 nm)
I hope you are reaping some serious rewards in monetising your knowledge this way. Not only are you intelligent, practically minded and clearly spoken, you have a pleasant non arrogant disposition so lacking amongst many of your peers and you make it an enjoyable experience learning from you. And after 20 years of self taught fumbling, you reveal such secrets and insights that would have saved me many hours and hopefully will in future. Big respect my good man. Best wishes.
Very well said. I could not agree more. Cheers.
Been working on computers for over 25 years and this is the 1st time I've seen this trick. Tried it successfully on a damaged 3TB HDD. This comes to prove that and ol' dog in fact can learn new tricks! :D :D Good video!
Ten years in my case, and yeah, first time for everything. Cant wait to try this out.
This problem has been around since the 80's. It's called "stiction".
I've been working on PCs since Windows 3.1 as well. I never tried to open a hard drive because of all the scare stories about getting dust in the enclosure and ruining it. I can't be the only person who has worked on computers for decades and cringed watching him pop that hard drive chassis without a clean room environment! I won't be as afraid to try it now though, if I really need to that is. Good video. 😁👍
yep, this ole dog learned a new trick as well.
@@faizelosman3462 how do I fix ERROR "SMART status bad, back up and recover"?
Just a reminder...If after opening the drive and successfully accessing the data...get all your data on another storage drive and never use the broken drive ever. Otherwise, you'll risk losing more data in the future. Great video Matt!!
You could use it for secondary back up (back up of back up). That cannot be worse than having only one back up.
@@typingcat I wouldn't. The read write head passes over the disk at a distance of about a hundred atoms while the disk itself spins at several thousand RPM. If even a single mote of dust were to collide with the head it could destroy the entire read write head assembly and possibly irreparably damage the disk itself. The only way I'd be comfortable using a reassembled disk would be if the disk were repaired in a JPL cleanroom.
There is a chance those damaged sectors were caused by dust particles. I recently tried just opening and closing a hard drive that was perfectly working but no longer had any important data on it, and that alone managed to screw up one or two sectors in the partition table (probably the worst place for it to happen, though recoverable). I would definitely recommend using a clean air enclosure like the DIY one on this channel, I'm building one right now before I do this on an actual stuck drive.
The first video I saw like this a guy worked on the hard drive inside a bubble with some sort of air filter running. I don't seem to be able to locate it any longer.
For those of you who might try this or try transplanting the platters, it often works as a last ditch means of recovering data. But *don’t ever return a drive that you’ve opened, back to service* - it’s an absolute guarantee that you have introduced particle matter into the drive and this can cause cumulative damage over time until the platter or the head fail fully. It’s like having just a little bit of sand in your transmission… You can be virtually guaranteed that if he ran this test on this drive under normal use on a daily or weekly basis, that there is a significant chance that he would see progressive drive failure over a short period of time and it’s a huge gamble that those gradual failures might cost some valuable data or cause a complete system or total drive failure. This definitely works to recover some data, after which it’s time to drill/hammer the drive and toss!
I've gotten sand in my transmission I was changing the fluid and I had the pan off and a big gust of wind came and blew leaves and dirt a few twigs on to the exposed valve body of the transmission. I hosed it down with diesel fuel to clean it. It was good times.
@f123raptor ~ Surely the idea is to *recover* otherwise lost data, rather than continue using the HDD?!
So it's just recover and toss away...That's honestly all i want to be able to do with a drive so perfect i think
The internet is a treasure trove. Got my HDD up and running after 6 years. Exact same issue and my hard drive was a 2007 model and was powered. The minute I fixed it, HDD came back to life in a jiffy. Coming to think of it, I could've actually done it 6 years ago had I searched better. The video just came up in my recommendations. Thankful to UA-cam for the first time.
Thank you for this video.
'Giving it a whack'... your number one choice for repairing stuff since the stone age. Thank you, my backup drive lives again!
🤣 🤣
Wow this worked for me. I had exactly the same problem - turned out the head was jammed. I dropped my hard drive from my desk and it stopped mounting entirely. Followed this tutorial and my hard drive mounted for the first time in months - I managed to recover all 6,000 files I thought I'd lost. Thank you so much!
Buy a cheap multi-set of Torx screwdrivers (one of them will work)
After many years my faithful DVD/HDD recorder finally gave up the ghost - or so I thought. All I could get from it was a physical clicking noise from the hard drive. Having watched quite a few rescue videos, I was loath to open the drive so eventually, I came across this video with its initial suggestion to tap/gently hit the edge of the housing as shown in the video. After a couple of goes, hey presto....the HD lives again, magic! Thank you so much. (In case anyone needs to know, the internal drive is a WD 1600BB from a Panasonic HDD/DVD recorder).
I dropped my external HDD, searched any videos available and stumbled to this one, and conclude this is the case for me, I pry open mine and the needle is also stucked on the platter I followed what he did in the video and luckily I recovered my data.
This video really helps, games and porn recovered lol
@TEL_02 The hard drive head, seen at 5:16.
@@b.l.o.o.d.m.o.s.e.s. Yeah the hard drive head lol sorry bout that.
@Computers4Ever1994 It was a 2.5 HDD one, like his above
By porn, you mean egg porn, right?
@@HopkinsTheMovie no no I bet it's some kind of food porn
This is a life saver... my brother and I repaired his external harddisk which contains more than 500gb worth of data on a 1tb Seagate and it worked! We tried to bring it first to a local repair shop but they told us that they couldn't fix it and recommended us to try to opt for a larger company that charges roughly around $1k to restore lost data... thank goodness for this vid we were able to repair the data in the storage ourselves.. just advice for others who will try, make sure to follow the steps carefully and make sure not to get any dust on the disk itself. After that, transfer all of your data into your computer or a different storage device. This is a life saver! Thank you so much for sharing this information @DIY Perks!
would love to see the clean air enclosure, please do the video
I will consider it if the demand is high enough (anyone interested please thumb up FarFromLogic's comment)
DIYPerks im using a mobile version, so I can only comment that I really want that video
lets see it !
DIY Perks Just wondering how high the demand needs to be prior to it being considered, just a passing thought and of course no obligations either way
FarFromLogic kde
Excellent video! Also worth mentioning: NEVER touch the disk platter with your fingers or anything; the skin oils (or even tiny scratches) are likely to damage that touched spot, losing that data-- which can possibly amount to megabytes of stuff!
Another point worth mentioning: Before commencing a drive salvation project like this, vacuum the desktop area first to rid the region of stray dust and particles, and also wear a face mask to help prevent a stray spittle from landing on the disk platter (for the same reasons described above.)
Genuinely just recovered my Samsung hard drive that was suffering the same fate as yours. Your step-by-step guide was flawless, much appreciated!
ua-cam.com/video/uzA4G05Ud04/v-deo.htmlsi=2evdYm9VTNXKUi0g
I've been waiting for this video for almost 10 years... and to think... the video itself is over 5 years old. :D
Me 15 years...
How to repair laptop hard drive visit #mydreamlab channel
WTF, same here!!!
😩😩I know right
me,,,, since i cant remember
0:25
That hard drive is kicking some hot club beats. That's my new jam.
Came for the data recovery info… stayed for the club anthems
it kinda sounds like if the morse code beep sound and a sci fi sound had a baby
Look up Darude - Sandstorm
Just in case you wanna hack someone’s Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram.twitter and TikTok.. contact *hackertin00* on instagram he is available for ya..he is very much reliable
@@caroltope9037 stfu bot
Wow! it works... My hard drive works after giving up on 1TB of data. I hit it side ways on hard surface nothing happened. I then hit it sideways on my palm and the baby just spin.. Thanks so much man.
Where was this video in the last 7 years... could have saved a lot of drives.
I just saved my drive using this method ... a HUGE THANK YOU DIY Perks, attempted first to build a clean chamber inside a box i broke by mistake, and fed up with all this and motivated mostly by your video i decided to give it a go in my room with bare hands, head was stuck, replaced it with a toothpick + screwdriver on the center going counterclockwise ... just had a piece of dust on the platter that i blowed gently but firmly ... it turned on, MOUNTED and i'm now retrieving all my precious life data :D THANK YOU AGAIN MATE I OWE YOU !
OH MY GOD !!! Thank you SO much for this video !!!
I had a hard drive that crashed 7 years ago, I never threw it away because it had a lot of great memories in it and I always hoped it would one day work again. And thanks to you it does ! You can't imagine how great it feels and how exited I am !!!
Once again thank you so so much !!!
It always makes me happy to hear success stories like this! I'm glad you managed to get your data back! :)
Before you fixed it what type of sound was the drive giving? My Buffalo external hard drive which stands up vertically fell over and now makes a clicking sound, this was a few years ago probably about 7 too!. I've just got a quote from a company and they are quoting me £500, it has a lot of picture memories on it but £500 is a lot of money!
I like your presentation, patience and also the way, you have generated hope for recovery of data from the old drive. One more additional point is sometimes when the drive is considered safe, packed and left in archive as back up and connected after 3-4 yrs , it not working , when we need really a kind of good power supply and clean up. The rusting due to oxidation, which is not visible locks the movable parts and this makes drive non functional and it requires a head assembly to be examined properly.
Great video.
10 years in and all I can say is you're a lifesaver. My HDD worked after learning from this video how to put the HDD head back.
I was a PC repair tech for three years while this video was out. Wish I had seen it then. Would have made countless customers very happy.
I can't express in words how much I love you for this... I went to a recovery data center and they were gonna charge me 800€+.. I saw your video and luckily I got the same problem as you, and in less than half an hour doing what you advised, I am now recovering my info successfully! Thank you very much
Luis Febrero Great to hear!!
DIY Perks Hi, I have a 250GB WD 3.5" HDD that doesn't have that issue shown on here, but it does turn on and sounds like it starts spinning but after 0.8-1.3 seconds when it reach certain speed it start clicking and do it for 3-4 times, then it sounds like it completely turn off.
Contingently, Anandtech made an experiment more than year ago using the exact same HDD and with exactly the same problem as mine, the author tried to do an plate(s) transplant and failed at it, after that I feared to try it myself and kept the HDD for when I can afford the data recovery, you you think it would work for me?
Thank you.
EDIT: I found the article, mine is the one with the black case.
www.anandtech.com/show/7330/hardware-tricks-how-to-not-fix-a-crashed-hard-drive
What did you end up doing? My Buffalo external hard drive which stands up vertically fell over and now makes a clicking sound, this was a few years ago. I've just got a quote from a company and they are quoting me £500, it has a lot of picture memories on it but £500 is a lot of money!
I cannot thank you enough, I just did what you committed in the video and the harddrive works now, I managed to recover all the important files lost for two and a half year.
I always been told the harddrive is going to explode (exaggeration) if I ever open it in a dusty environment but it works just fine now! And it has run for several hours and still running! Thanks again
That's great news! :) Well done!
DIY Perks cdbjjjjkpu
Kakarot1994 He said it was Torx screwdriver size T6, they are cheap just go to a store that sells screwdrivers and pick one up for 5 euros or something, optionally take your harddrive with you and try the various ones out
This method worked for me! I had thrown a fatal blow upon my laptop, in a fit of frustration, and the HDD started clicking and everything froze. I brought it to Best Buy, and a member of the Geek Squad said it would be a minimum of $300, and upwards of $1200 to recover any data from the HDD. At that time, the HDD was not detected in the BIOS. I took it back home with me, and read many online forums about the subject and most outcomes did not look promising. I found this fantastic clip online and decided to roll the dice, and great success! Thank you my friend. You saved me a bundle! Now, to sign up for some anger management sessions.
That's brilliant. I've a selection of old hard drives which won't fire up. Absolutely nothing to lose by having a go at this. Thanks.
Did it go well?
@@thespacemanfil
Saved one out of, I think it was three I tried to fix. Wasn't the one I would have really liked to have saved, but still, better than nothing, and it is still working now.
Better than nothing I guess. Thanks for replying 2 years later
Hi! My friend's Western Digital Elements 500gb hard drive fell from a height of about 4 and a half feet, and she had no backups of all the photos she stored in that drive. Thanks to your video, I was able to open the drive, return the spindle back to its parking mode, and after assembling the cover again, managed to start up the drive and recover all the data within. Saved her lots of money in the process. Thanks for the helpful video!
Before you fixed it what type of sound was the drive giving? My Buffalo external hard drive which stands up vertically fell over and now makes a clicking sound, this was a few years ago. I've just got a quote from a company and they are quoting me £500, it has a lot of picture memories on it but £500 is a lot of money!
I owe you so much for this video. I stupidly had 2 months of school work, hundreds of hours of work, all stored on one hard drive. I thought it was all gone, including term end projects, side projects and everything else there is. I tried everything and I found your video. It gave me hope that taking it apart was the best choice. Upon inspection, I had the same problem as you and I was able to reverse the problem. Booted it up, backed up everything and everything was back. I was honestly in a state of depression and stress over losing my drive.
One thing to note, we both had Seagate hard drives. I am sticking to WD in the future as my other hard drive has seen much worse and the only thing to go was the USB cable. Seagate drives aren't reliable in my mind and I will not be trusting my important files on one. The drive I just fixed has been retired to a back up drive inside my computer which I will be backing up my work to every night. I'm considering online storage since hard drives can be so delicate at times.
Joad Hughes That's great to hear!
DIY Perks Hi Joad . What you suggest to do in case of clicking noise problem ?
Seagate's reliability is down ever since they bought Maxtor -- the HD maker that went bankrupt because all the crappy hard drive they were producing. The most reliable ranking used to be Hitachi, WD, then Seagate. WD has since acquired Hitachi -- hopefully the Hitachi brand HD reliability is not affected.
Online storage is a good idea. I told my sister to back up her stuff online but she didn't and then her drive crashed about a couple years ago -- I was able to recover 95% of her files (lucky the drive failed in a non-dramatic fashion), now she backs up her files. I got another sister who also don't back up her files as I suggested. I will just have to wait for her to lose her files before she would learn I suppose.
***** I agree totally. Only use the best, most reliable, least used drive as a backup, not a drive that could fail at any time. For really important data, do a second backup on alternate days such as Monday and Thursday. At home I use an external drive to back up everything I have created since the last external backup and USB drives to backup newly created work in addition to the work saved on hard drive. So I usually end up with 3 copies of the files. Overkill, perhaps but I haven't lost anything for many years. Old drives (1990's) used to last 10 years and have deteriorated after 2000, so now it's not uncommon to have one fail after 3 years. CD's/DVDs are not good for long term storage because of disk rot. Some micro SD cards recently failed. The original promise of computer data storage being for ever has not been realised.
Do you really think it's a good idea to make it a Backup drive, you really need confidence in your backups?
Thank you sooo much! You saved me a fortune! Your instructions worked perfectly on a 4TB external 2,5" Seagate HDD, after unstucking the head I could copy the whole drive to a new one without any issues and restore months of unretrievable work!
Dude, thank you! My external HDD (STEA2000400) suddenly stopped working and was not recognized by any computer or Win/Lin OS, not even through a powered SATA/USB adapter. I followed your tutorial and it worked! I was able to save all my data! I really appreciate what you've done. Seagate had referred me to their data recovery partner service that wanted to charge me ~$650 USD. I'm glad I found your channel! Keep up the great work!
Cheers!
Was your drive a 2.5 or 3.5?
@@JORGE4757S 2.5
Don't let this detract from the importance of backups. My hard drive failed last month and let's just say I would not be here today if I didn't have backups
Ironically, the reason I'm watching this video is because I'd like to recover the little bit of data I hadn't backed up for lack of space...
This was a really interesting video and I can't believe the disk still worked afterwards! A couple of tips though. You can actually create a temporary cleanroom environment in your own bathroom by running the shower really hot so that the room fills with steam and then turning the shower off and letting the steam settle. The steam condenses on all the little particles of dust and they fall to the floor leaving the air completely free of dust. Then you can open your hard drive with less worry about particles landing on the platter. Also you can buy a little comb shaped tool especially for lifting up the multiple heads off the platter all at once and then you can move them off the disk without dragging them across the surface causing damage.
Thanks!
Does the comb shaped tool have a name?
You marvellous marvellous man. I have been repairing computers for 10 years and was always afraid to take a hard disk to bits. Completely swallowed the clean room myth. You have changed my life. You plucky genius, you
Seems also like you could just buy a blower made for camera lenses/sensors and just use that to give it a blow before you put the lid back on.
How dud you fix it? any vidoe?
#ProperPerspective #CreativeSolutions #DivineBirthright #DivineFriendship | 777ADVENTURES
THose who did HDtune, Is your hard drive still 100%
That's why men are better computer programmers and electrical engineers.
YES THANK YOU..BY YOUR TAPPING IT ON A HARD SURFACE AS SEEN ON YOUR VIDEO...THE COVER LESS LAPTOP EXT HARD DRIVE STARTED TO WORK AND FILES WERE OK..SO I DIDNT HAVE TO OPEN IT UP..THANK YOU..EASY METHOD EXPLAINED SO WELL...
Keep in mind that you probably would not be able to do this with some of the newer hard drives (especially the higher capacity ones). That is due to the hard drives being filled with Helium these days instead of air to reduce drag on the platters inside.
Hello.First of all, thank you so so so much from Turkey! You clearly made my day. Thanks to you I saved my entire picture album and data, and also money. My WD 1tb external hard drive disk was damaged and could not be detected by my and my wife’s computer. I sent it to a computer technician and he told me that he replaced the board of it but it did not work. And recommended me to sent the disk to a data recovery company. However, I saw your video and decided to apply it. Despite the fact that my hard drive head was not in the middle of the platter and it was in its original place, I moved it forward and back. After I mounted all the pieces back (with the hard drive head on its original place), I connected it to my computer and it worked like a charm. And a copule of minutes ago, I copied all my data to my computer from the external hard drive. It is still working.
Thank you so much again. I will recommend this vidoe to my friends and share it on facebook and other favorite websites.
selamlar *****. benim gönderdiğim bilgisayarcı benim disk için "kafa atıyor" demişti. aynı şey midir bilemem. yandı derken board'u yandıysa 30-40 TL'ye değiştiriyorlar sanırım. Benimkini değiştirmişti ama bir işe yaramadı. Ben de o kadar para vermek istemiyordum ve bir şey yapmadan kenara da atmak istemedim. Sonuçta, madem o kadar para vermen imkansız, o riski almaya değer. Sonuçta o parayı veremeyeceksen zaten hard disk senin için ölmüş demektir. Onun yerine içini açıp gösterdiği gibi hdd başını oynatmak senin için bir şans olacaktır. Yalnız şöyle bir durum var, ben bilgileri kurtardıktan sonra hdd'yi yeniden taktım bu sefer çalışmadı. Dolayısıyla, hdd'yi çalıştırabilirsen zaman kaybetmeden tüm bilgilerini kurtarmanı tavsiye ederim.
+mustpunk Just finished watching the video - and your additional experience gives me added confidence in my upcoming attempt. Good to hear the method worked for you. Hoping for a similiar success. Cheers.
***** Haven't tried it yet - maybe next weekend when I work up the courage, lol.
+SilentKnight43 i hope you the best.
+SilentKnight43 Did it work? I'm in the same situation just about to start doing surgery to my 1TB seagate drive .. I'm very nervous and could really use some advice if it did work .. cheers
Dude! Holy shit, I can't thank you enough. My external 2,5" HDD had a Headcrash and the german companies for Data-recovery offered to rescue my data for only 600€. No joke! Then I came across your tutorial and it worked absolutely fine. Thank you so much. Ben
Ronny Rakete Do you keep using that drive or did you backup and get a new one?
Hello, I would recommend lowering the hard drive temperature to 5-6 ° C (41-42 ° F) before moving the playhead. Due to thermal expansion the read head should be easier to move.
Sometimes even the simple fact of lowering the temperature makes it possible to recover the disc without opening it.
You can do this by putting the disc in the vegetable compartment of your refrigerator (10 min). And / Or put a tupperware on your disc with water and ice cubes (the water will remain at 0 ° C (32 ° F) as long as there are ice cubes) only when it is in operation because be careful, the temperature of the disc must not drop below 5 ° C (41 ° F).
thermal contraction?
you know too much, but thanks i will try it :D
There is a risk of condensation damage if you cool the drive and run it.
Oh my goodness you are a lifesaver. I just followed your instructions and saved all my files. I cannot thank you enough. Greetings and heartfelt gratitude from South Africa, Bel :)
You're welcome! I'm glad you got your files back. :)
@@DIYPerks dear Perks 9 years ago this was the first video I saw from your channel .. and the rest is history.
If you want to minimize dust exposure, set up your workspace on the counter in a bathroom. Run a hot shower for a few minutes and then wait for the steam to dissipate. Dont open the door or move around too much. You will have 10-20 minutes of a relatively dust free workspace.
Or even better: To maximize moisture damage, run it directly under the faucet! (I really can't tell if you're being serious?)
I really think that a DRY and dust free environment is what you want. Too much moisture is very bad.
@@tomkarlsborn2384 not really i tied to put a hdd ona a freezer for 12 hrs just to make it work. and when I try to plug it in it still works and reading my hdd, tho I cant acces the drive because thats the main reason I put it in the feezer because of the hdd health is 3% and cant load the fles in it but still reading the hdd well.
@@tomkarlsborn2384 It's a bit counter-intuitive but makes sense to me. The steam is the liquid moisture in the air transforming into gas which is called evaporation, right? While the steam is present, sure, not a good idea. It means there is still plenty of moisture that hasn't been transformed to gas. But once you stop running the water and the steam is gone after a few minutes, you actually have a time window where the air will now be dryer than before, because of that evaporation. A clothes iron demonstrates this process in a far quicker space of time, literally seconds. The iron is pressed against the clothes, some steam is released, the clothes can get a little wet but then with the heat the moisture transforms to gas, and in no time at all the clothes are dryer than they were before, as well as creaseless. For a longer time period example, try to think of the weather and times when you have been in a very humid location, really feeling that energy-draining humidity, and then it has finally rained, and a few hours after the air is lovely and drier than before. As for the dust - the water content earlier will have collected and carried a good amount of it down to the floor where it will stick and sit for a while (if you don't move around much later), similar to the ancient method of sprinkling water on floors prior to dusting. At least, in theory. :)
Y'all are fuckin stupid bro. The steam captures dust particles in the air. Is that not common knowledge? It's like a filter for the air.
THANK YOU FOR THIS VIDEO!! I backed up all of my laptop's data to an external hard drive in preparation of reformatting, and then after I reformatted the laptop, I DROPPED the hard drive and it stopped working! I was so upset, but came across this video, bought the proper size screwdriver, and a few days later was able to repair the hard drive and recover all of my data! It was exactly this issue. You're a lifesaver!!!
Holy s**t, it actually worked for me!!! The guy had said it would cost a minimum of 8000 Indian rupees and that too outside my home state said there was no chance for the disk. This is perfect. I can't thank you enough man!!!
After went to several computer services and they said my hard drive cannot be fixed, i tried this method and it worked...., thanks for the video
Dear, sir! Thank you, so very very much for your excellent instruction on how to repair a problematic hard drive disk! Really appreciating your language too! Clear and caring! Wishing you, sir, all the very best, always! Best Regards, from Sweden! Stay safe and healthy, in these perilous pandemic days!
Holy cow! I have discarded many dead drives in my day that were "unrecoverable". One of my clients had a 500GB Seagate drive with client tax data that they had not backed up and it was humming. Before finding your video this is not something I would have ever dared. However, I successfully "unstuck" the read/write head, spun up the drive and recovered several years of tax data for them. Thanks SO MUCH for your video!
Quite literally saved my 4TB drive, it made the click of death initially and was unable to be detected by my computer. However after finding your video, the bump method managed to pull the needle out and let me pull data off of it before retiring the drive forever. Thank you so much!
Your clicking wasn’t like the video right? It was a continuous click, cause my clicking is not like the video.
Before you attempt banging the drive against a solid surface, first try the centripetal force method.
1. Hold the hard drive in your hand with the side of the drive facing the ground (or outward).
2. Fully extend your arm and keep it extended.
3. Raise your arm in the air (keep the side of the drive facing down).
4. While keeping your arm extended, swing your arm toward the floor.
This accomplishes the same thing as tapping or banging the drive on hard surface without the major jolt or vibration. It's a more subtle approach to accomplish the same task.
I was so bummed, my western digital My Passport external drive got knocked over....i found it on the floor, and plugging it in, it only whirred, 4 terabytes of all my music, so i saw your post, hoping against hope, and ...... it worked. omg, it worked.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart....this is one of those things that if i lost, i would feel less than whole. First world problem, yes, but all the same, joyous and grateful.
@@wmtodd8249 Glad it worked out for you. Please note that these external USB drives are typically made with the cheapest parts available to the manufacturer. They tend to fail much more often than the hard drives you'd install into a computer. That said, copy your data from this drive onto a new one.
Also, you can buy an internal hard disk drive (the type you install inside of a PC) and a hard disk enclosure that has USB ports on it. This provides you a hard drive that has a higher (but not immortal) life expectancy. 3.5" drives will require an external power supply but are typically more reliable than 2.5" drives that will get power from the USB port (no external power supply required). Either way, building your own external USB drive using an drive designed for internal use will be more reliable in the long run.
Online storage is cheap now days. Check out backblaze.com for a cheap method to backup all of your data.
@@kenteague6542 Thank you for this info as well, it pretty much answers and confirms any questions i had about the nature of those "convenient" portables. And for gravity challenged dorks such as I (I drop things), until some electromagnetic field that buffers and cancels out a harsh fall
gets built into these things, and protected enough that all that electromagnetic energy won't wipe out all the memory on it, (in other words not in our lifetimes if ever, lol), i seriously need to practice the precautionary measures you mention, SSDs are coming down in price, too.... using those in the enclosures you mention, that's got to be an added bonus, but here i shaddup, and check out the link you posted, thank you sir....
Thank you so much DIY Perks. You would be surprised how this video resolved my issue by accident. I was looking for a solution for "Boot Device Not Found" Error and tried all available on Google & UA-cam but could't find a solution. Finally, as i was about to give up while i let UA-cam play on my other computer. Guess what? God is great, auto play brought u to my screen. First i never thought it was gonna work but i gave u the benefit of the doubt and tried your method as a last resort. Guess what? It was the same problem as on your video and used the same Technic, and now IT WORKS. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK U SO MUCH. I did it for the first time and now i learn a new thing thanks to u.
Great to hear! Glad you were brought to my video and that you got your data back. Don't forget to back it all up now. :)
DIY Perks gijigihgu
beruu berd really? my Dell is doing same thing today I should give it a try then. I pulled out the hard drive but didn't open it further. I will take my chances now. tks for sharing the success.
lol. you sound like me. i've had this video #1 on my watch later list AND my (clicking external) hard drive right there for months now. i just have this feeling like... it's not gonna work. so i delay and procrastinate (all the time) in giving it a try. but i will, dammit. i will!
BUT, i must say the 'dislikes' 700 to 'likes' 28,000 fills me with a little optimism. and the dude seems affable, personable, reasonably intelligent and that's gotta count for something...
so, did yours work? wait, don't tell me!
...actually, yeah. tell me.
It feels like you are overthinking things a little. I think he meant that figuratively.
Commenting many years later, but... The 4K of people who thumbs down this video are probably data recovery bottom feeders.
1:56 are these disks dangerous at all?
Long story short I opened the same hard drive but it shattered into a thousand pieces right in front of me
Found this by accident. Pleasantly shocked. They said it couldn't be done. Resisted the temptation to read all 7000 comments. Life is good and so are you.
Thank you for this tutorial. I got the same problem and I managed to retrieve my data + I didn't spend on data retrieval. Kudos to this!
OMG. Thank you so much. I have a 2.5 inch 1 TB portable hard drive similar to yours. In 2012, as I was backing up photos and videos from my trip onto it, it fell off the top of a computer just about 2 feet off the ground and hit the hard floor and stopped working ever since. When I plugged it into the computer, the light on the drive would light up but would die after about a minute and no drive letter showed up on the computer. I tried everything (minus opening it up because I was afraid I would get dust on it and ruin it) I could to fix the problem to no avail. I called a few places to see if they can recover the data but they said it would cost $500 or more and there's no guarantee all my data would be recovered. The drive has been sitting on the shelf for 7 years. Today, after seeing your video, I thought I'd give it another look. I opened it up and to my surprise, the drive head is also in the middle of the platter not parked. I did exactly what you did step by step and it's now working! It's been 7 years now and I finally got my precious videos and photos back. Thank you so much!
Hi Matt:
I've never taken a hard drive apart because I was taught in college that it will die once exposed to dust. But from my textbook, here is the section that explains what can happen if you open one up:
A traditional hard disk drive (HDD) is composed of individual disks, or platters, with
read/write heads on actuator arms controlled by a servo motor-all contained in a
sealed case that prevents contamination by outside air.
The aluminum platters are coated with a magnetic medium. Two tiny read/write
heads service each platter, one to read the top and the other to read the bottom of the
platter.
The coating on the platters is phenomenally smooth. It has to be, as the read/write
heads actually float on a cushion of air above the platters, which spin at speeds between
3500 and 10,000 rpm. The distance (flying height) between the heads and the disk surface is less than the thickness of a fingerprint. The closer the read/write heads are to
the platter, the more densely the data packs onto the drive. These infinitesimal tolerances
demand that the platters never be exposed to outside air. Even a tiny dust particle
on a platter would act like a mountain in the way of the read/write heads and would
cause catastrophic damage to the drive. To keep the air clean inside the drive, all hard
drives use a tiny, heavily filtered aperture to keep the air pressure equalized between the
interior and the exterior of the drive.
OMG Someone finally said it! Opening a hard drive up and exposing the Platters is bad. That is why they build hard drives in dust "proof" rooms...I was going to say, this is very bad and you put your hard drive at a much higher risk of corrupting it more or killing it.
Can you please tell me what is the name of your book?
I think that he was pretty clear that this is a last resort type effort where the only other option is to throw it in the garbage because you can't afford or the data is not worth employing a data recovery service. He also advises copying the recovered data to a good drive and considering the old drive as damaged. What else do you want from him?
How do you pronounce 'infinitesimal'?
Yes, HDDs are barometrically sealed. And yes, a single invisible speck of dust or moisture can "damage" data integrity. It can interfere mechanically with moving micron-scale tolerances. It can interfere magnetically (and "stick" to the heads) if it carries any electrical valence.
On the plus side, few dust particles floating around a typical home/workshop are going to be composed of ferromagnetic elements. And today's HDD mechanisms are indeed far more robust than their ancient IBM-era forebears. The platter media have greater data persistence, the motors and heads have finer resolutions, the controllers run layers of real-time error-correction.
I would never blow directly onto an exposed HDD platter! That would deposit more problems than it blows away. As a warranty-void emergency data recovery repair this approach is worth a shot, and it works more often than no attempt at all, but I wouldn't consider the HDD "reliable" anymore, I'd copy the data off it and onto another drive. It already failed once before, even ignoring any damage caused by the "repair" attempt.
You can't really condemn this video, though. DIY low-cost full data recovery (or at least 98% data recovery) from a fully dead HDD ... this time.
Although the "professional" data recovery services might condemn it, lol, if it means they have to work with more difficult drives botched up by DIY amateurs.
One of my hard drives got flung off the table while in use about 12 years ago. It was clicking.
Just found it again, took it out of its enclosure and connected it. Still clicking.
Whacked it gently. It spun right up. Running ddrescue right now at about 40 MB/s :D
i gave my hdd a little knock and it goes back alive. thanks for the advice mate!
Dude, you just saved my digital life! For a combination of reasons, ALL of my precious files were on a laptop HDD in a compact USB enclosure. While connected to my working laptop, the drive accidentally fell, only about 16", down to a carpeted floor, but that was enough to kill it. When I found that it wouldn't spin up I thought for sure it was a goner till I watched your video. With nothing to lose, I opened it up and did exactly what you did - moved the heads off the disc stack and back to the parked position. Reassembled it, fired it up and, PRESTO!, my digital life was restored. Thank you SO MUCH for this video!!
You sir are a legend Thank you your video has saved 300,000 personal photos with your clearly & well explained video in the past I would have thrown the Ext HD away..I can’t thank you enough! Even better I never lost a single photo..
Absolutely love the happiness in your voice when it starts working.
The moment you showed the hook, I thought:
"Is it safe?" well done
lol, Marathon man hey? Awesome movie
I had the same conversation at the dental hospital with a nurse and student dentist who was anaesthetising my gum prior to a molar removal, but injected directly into the abscess instead. You may well have heard me scream if you live in the North West UK. When I stopped crying (literally tears rolled down my face for a good three minutes) and they had mopped up various antibody pus and blood fluid releases, he was apologising profusely and looked mortified, but when I could speak, I said "Yes, oh my god yes, it's as safe as it could be" which broke the ice with the nurse in attendance, who burst out laughing then proceeded to explain it to the young student dentist. We all gotta learn and I don't bear a grudge. I'm damn sure he won't make that same mistake again at least. It was a character building level of pain so I could kinda sympathise with Dustin and the need for clove oil. I can't imagine a worse method of torture.
Thanks for the tutorial, I was able to repair friend's HDD and get some of the data back for him! He dropped his portable HDD and got the head stuck on the platter but it wasn't as bad as yours.
Great videos! One thing to consider, files aren't necessarily in order on the drive so 2% corruption could affect 100% of files or only 1 file... likely somewhere in between but 2% corruption probably affects more than 2% of files, the larger the average file size the higher the odds more files overlap that 2% corruption
Still useful a decade later! A quick tip to add for clicking drives - make sure they're getting sufficient power (ie not connected to an extension sharing power to other devices) so always try another USB port/device for connecting too!
I'm going through a bunch of drives that were thought to be dead on behalf of a friend - turns out, 4/5 were just failing in this way (clicking noise) due to power issues as his PC case ports (not motherboard ports) were connected to a internal splitter and not providing enough power. As for the other one, this method worked great, although would stress its a last resort - its being imaged as I type to an SSD, so fingers crossed it lives long enough to get all the data off.
I will give it a try. I really have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Do you hold the secret of the universe in that hdd?
This guy could convince me to walk off a cliff with that voice
lol
Thank you. I opened my hard drive to find this problem. I only need to recover some documents and pictures so this was great!!! ❤
Tried this, drive no longer made the original sound, but started clicking. Adjusted a little more and it made a much worse screeching sound, I unplugged immediately. Adjusted again, back to clicking. The disc itself is visibly damaged in areas by this point and still not detected. Thankfully, I don't think I had anything TOO important on the drive. It didn't work for me, but thank you anyway for showing an actual tutorial on how to do a DIY fix for this issue unlike everywhere else that says "DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT ATTEMPTING A FIX YOURSELF, PAY A DATA RECOVERY EXPERT, DOWNLOAD SCAM SOFTWARE, OR NOTHING"
If you send that hard drive to a company to fix the problem, you have to mortgage the house to pay for the fix.
Facts ! I heard $1000 per TB is going rate now,
Scam and a Rip off but if you’re desperate we know how that goes
This was the most helpful video. Period. This is what enabled me to recover data from a drive everyone else told me was completely dead. Thank you, sir!
that reaction when it worked again!! you are a genius
you are definitely sent from God almighty. My Hard drive fell down about a month now and i tried all i know. i decide to take a chance and open my western digital like you showed in the video, did it just as you showed. screwed it up back and boom i can access my drive and my info. i amm so so soo grateful for this video. thank you
THIS VIDEO WAS NOT "SOMEWHAT USEFUL" , IT IS A FREAKING LIFE SAVER!! I ALMOST LOST ALL 1TB OF DATA, AND THANK YOU VERY MUCH SIR! I WOULD HUG YOU RIGHT NOW IF YOU WERE HERE
There 2 types of people in the world:
1. Those who do backups.
2. Those who will.
how pls describe when my external hard drive showing unallocated...its moving but cannot appear in computer. pls help
JOYDEEP GHOSH i have the same problem, i dont know what to do.. 😐
@@TravelingBong Since I live in Germany, I can just give you a rough translation of the buttons you have to press
Press windows key + r, then type diskmgmt.msc in the text field (if you're running Windows 7,8,10 then you can also use the windows search instead)
Then you will see all the connected drives on the bottom of the disk management tool (the white bars with black or blue stripes). There will probably be a "Drive 0", which is the boot drive. Search for the drive you want to mount to windows (probably "Drive 1" or 2, depending on how many internal drives the computer has). Repeat the following procedure for all the partitions that you damaged drive has: if the partition is highlighted black (if it's already blue, skip this first step), right click on it, select "create" (or "new" or something like that) and then select volume. Then this partition should be highlighted blue. Right click on that and select "assign drive letter" or something similar. In the pop-up, select the drive letter you want to assign to the external drive (e.g. "F:"). Click ok and your drive will likely show up in the windows explorer. Warning: back all the files up and never use the damaged drive again. It will not be reliable.
@@bspringer thank you...
You Sir Are Amazing! Just recovered all the Data on an old drive that went bad over 15yrs ago 😉👍
Frickin Thank God for people like you. This helped me recover a 2TB hard drive.
+PixlSwift It helped you recover the data, which in most cases, is worth more than the actual drive. That 2TB drive is damaged, and very prone to future problems. It's basically junk. So here's what you do next:
- Send it back for a warranty if its still covered. Most countries have a minimum 1yr warranty law on sold goods.
- If its more than a year, see if you can find the box, as some re-badged drives give you an extended warranty (2+ yrs). If you don't have the box or receipt, see their website.
- And if that fails open its casing and look for the Serial Number of the actual drive, and see if it is covered under international warranty for the actual drive from WD etc.
- And if that is also expired (old drive!) then you may want to buy a similar drive off the internet, swap them, then claim a new one from the new warranty. It sounds devious but it is ethical and just, since most drive failures are the fault of the manufacturer and not the user. I don't condone you doing this is it is a user fault such as a heavy drop, water damage, magnet damage, static or surge damage.
And if you fail to have your money refunded or the goods refurbished, the next best thing would be to use the drive for non-important uses. I recommend plugging it to your TV and playback some movies, or to record Live TV. If the drive fails, you won't be losing precious data, and can watch the video content through other sources.
+Kangal the point is, that the last screw is made under sticker so they can find out if you opened the drive or not, and warranty simply becomes invalid
HELP. What does one do when the only screw turns out to be sealed? Looks like they melted plastic over the screw (or maybe the screw itself is plastic) and there is no way to get a screwdriver on it This is an external DELL/Seagate 2Tb FreeAgent GoFlex made in China.
THose who did HDtune, Is your hard drive still 100%
@@ekinteko If taking back to the store , the FIRST thing to do is wipe the drive so no other person can get his files.
I have fixed a hard drive by putting it in the freezer. Left it in there for 1hr and 15 minutes then thawed it out for 3 and a half hours. work hard drive went down too so done the same and again it fixed it. Done the same with a virgin modem and it worked. the work hard drive went on for 11 months which was on every day. Not recommended of course but at my own risk..Great video and thanks for uploading
Interesting and presented in a logical straightforward manner. I have the cover of my SCSI drive loosened, and was looking for a technique to free the head. I had heard that it was better to spin the head as you did. So, here I go into the unknown. ( I'm kidding, I have had HDs apart, but never with the intent to get them running).
7:45
It's like he didn't expect to be able to actually fix it and was surprised when he did LOL
Thats where fun and happiness will happen since your experimenting
I think you just changed the World with this one bros. thank you
Wow, in my house, the instant I remove the cover, dust is all over the platter. I am quite impressed how little dust is in your environment - I didn't see a single particle in your video!
Thanks for the video. I'm going to give this a try on two of my oldest data drives that aren't spinning up. Fortunately, I work for a cleanroom certification company and we have many hoods at our facility I can use to perform this method in a "clean" environment.
I was actually made to believe that hard drives can never be repaired once in these conditions. Great !
Just want to say Thank you, your video saved my external hard drive and I successfully recover 99% of my data without cost me a bomb at data recovery service.
my external hard drive showing unallocated...its moving but cannot appear in computer. pls help
Is your hard drive still worked now?
@@TravelingBong same here, found any Solution?
@@Pilot_Alex no bro
Thank you sir for speaking so clearly so that I from Indonesia can understand so easily every word you said. 🙂
Your video is PERFECT!!!! Thank you so much for your great information!!! With your video I have recovered all my data from my hard disk!!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!
Agape Bijoux Hey, did you have a clicking sound or a buzzing sound?
Omar El-Etr a buzzing sound :)
Mine is completely dead :S
Omar El-Etr :( I am so sorry Omar!!! to be honest I haven't recovered all the data but only some... but when i have time I want to try with some softwares. Now I have to buy another hard disk. You can try to recover data with EaseUS Recover data. It's a fabulous software.
My Hard Drive doesn't even initialise! It's not recognised by the computer. Consequently, I can't run data recovery programmes like EaseUS (which I've attempted to use but failed) because they don't even recognise the device to recover data from it. When I asked computer technicians, they told me that there's a problem with the media itself, and that's unrecoverable except by data recovery companies which start off by $500, which is insane!
DUDE!!!......years later and you're still saving lives!!! Thank you so much
and even after 2 years you wrote this comment. he's a legend
"Oh my goodness".. I dunno which is scarier? That reaction or the fact you have dentistry instruments to hand!
We don't kink shame here.
Dental tools are actually very handy working with electronic circuitry. A better option would be those same tools in non-conductive plastic.
This video saved me $$$$. Geek Squad at Best But couldn't read the hard drive and said they would have to send it out for data recovery which starts at $250 and can go as high as $1000. After watching this video I bought an amazing computer tool kit from Amazon that had everything I needed to take the top off the hard drive (thanks for the tip about the hidden screw). Sure enough the reader was stuck on the table. 5 turns counter clockwise and the reader was seated back in the starting harness. Put the hard drive back in the computer and it's working. Hind sight is 20/20, now backing up my files!!!!! Thank you DIY Perks. So helpful.
Thank you for the help, just fixed my Seagate 1TB which had this problem. Luckily the head was on the very edge of the platter and I was able to pull it off easily.
I've got some pointers to share for first timers who might have this problem with the same hard drive as me:
- if you hear fast paced beeping (this was my problem), do not try the bashing method. Edit: YOU CAN IF YOU WANT TO, I didn't and fixed it by opening it.
- if your hard drive hasnt been fixed in a week or so (if it has the stuck head), it will still work and I would avise you to get it fixed ASAP.
- Don't try and force the screws open if you dont have the right screwset/head to open them.
- Don't worry about special name brand screwdrivers, you can find a cheap precision set at your local discount centre or dollar store that has a hardware section. (I fixed my hard drive with a DEKTON 31PC screwdriver set)
- If you have a precision set that has a magnet inside the screwdriver to hold the screw bits, IT IS OKAY TO USE! When you place the bit inside the magnetic holder, the bit itself does not become magnetised. Small magnets wont affect your hard drive, only the big strong magnets will cause alot of damage
- Take your time when opening up your hard drive and stay calm, try not to breathe heavy when you're directly over your open drive.
- Keep your hands steady when you're turning the platter and do not do it at an angle. I was lucky that my hard drive head was on the edge of my platter, so the force that might be needed to pull it off will differ, take it easy.
- When you move the head, it will most likely spring back into its original place, so give it a little tap or nudge to see if it does, close your drive ASAP when you're satisfied.
- Screw everything back in, but dont go over the edge when tightening your screws.
- Place your gromits back on the side screws and place it into your hard drive case or on a non metal solid flat surface.
- Plug it in and hope for the best. Good luck!
Hope this helps! I got all my files successfully off in 30-40 minutes, I had around 40gb of data (around 35,600 files). I have yet to see any files gone corrupt but I will reply to my comment if I do come across them.
I would keep this drive as a throw away and buy a new drive, I wouldnt reccomend using the same drive you opened.
+ｏｈ I have a 1TB Seagate (Samsung) external USB 3.0 drive that sounds like it had the same problem .... plug in cable, and you hear a faint rapid beeping sound , for like, 10 beeps..... then silence. Opened the case, and find that they modified the interface to have a USB3 only interface on the drive instead of being SATA. Is this your case? Beeping?
+richmanfl My drive (Model: SRD00F1) is samsung too and has USB 3.0. so most likely yes the head is stuck if you hear fast paced beeping.
+cola I did the same way but some folders are missing :(
I did everything you said and I had the exact same problem, thanks so much I had so many important files and thought I lost them forever. Seagate wanted me to pay them $600 to send it in and do what you just did. I am so happy you made this video, thanks again man you're awesome.
my external hard drive showing unallocated...its moving but cannot appear in computer. pls help
Hi. Just opened, fixed, closed and tested my defunct Seagate hard disk.
I had the same issue as you.
Thanks for the video - very helpful :-)
Nom de dieu ce tuto vient de me sauver la vie ! Un disque WD Mypassport de 4to avait fait une chute d'un mètre sur le sol. Le disque dur claquait un peu et se mettait hors tension. Lorsque j'ai ouvert le disque, la tête de lecture était pourtant bien positionnée, je l'ai volontairement déplacée sur le disque puis remise à sa place et après avoir rebranché le tout, bingo, ça remarche. Merci !
You saved me (at least) $1000 from a data recovery shop!!! Your advice totally worked and I didn’t need a clean room either. Thank you so much for this 🙏
This video saves millions of lives,
+jinrex015 I'm sure it saved yours too.
+planetX15 not yet because I don't have that specific screwdriver, And I though it was an allen driver
+jinrex015 It saved mine: College work saved --> Achieve a Good job sooner --> Life saved.
+Lexyvil good to see this brad! have a great life
the screwdriver cost me 2,40€. and it worked great (the tutorial i mean not the screwdriver)
Thank you so much for saving my memories.. I almost lost my daughter's photos n videos in my 1tb Hd. Which is priceless. I follow your guide on the first place, and it works. Thank you..
Dani Maulana hey man , I dropped my laptop and I saw this vid and opened the hdd and it was stuck and made the noise like this one in the vid. I opened it in a very clean room and made the job as quick as possible. Now I have to test it on a working laptop. How did you do it? Can you please help me ? Thank you :)
the first trick saved my future generations, thnx mate
This is a very cool video. However everyone should realize that it's good to try if you have a large margin for error. IE no critical data on drive. I still recommend professional data recovery service if data is critical.
DeepSpar Yes, if the data is super important I agree that it's probably best to get a professional to do the job.
DeepSpar It costed me like $1000.00
Wow such cynism.
***** *know
***** You're aware I'm not the same person you were talking to, right?
DIY Perks in a few years:
Today we are going to fix a few transistors on a micro processor.
Hi DIY Perks,
thank you very much for this video. Last week I recovered with the help of your video data from a HDD which head crashed 10 years ago. Not only did you save me a lot of money for a professional HDD data recovery, but also almost 3 years of photos (and the memories which come along with them).
Here is what I did:
1. The external HDD was making strange intermittend noises and I could not mount it. So I hit it sideways on the table as you suggested and it spun up and I could mount it.
2. Using the Linux command line tool "ddrescue" I copied the hard drive to a new one. Unfortunately the copy was not yet readable, because the file system was compromized.
3. Because the file system was exfat, I couldn't repair the copy under Linux, so I switched to Windows and used the command line tool "chkdsk", which fixed the file system.
Now everything works and I am really happy! :-)
THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!
What was the brand and model of the drive?