I like that you’re honest. Most data recovery service dudes will act as if opening your hard drive will cause permanent damage just so you can call them for help and pay up.
These fucking data recovery dudes are mad pei , they let down all of your hopes and asking stupid questions and doesn't have guts to except the challenge , ones they heard about you did open your hard drive ,that's it " I am not touching it " world end up, life is under the thread , I am dying , I m blind , I say keep opening bloody hard disk ,you one day learns things.
Fascinating to see how these devices work. They are more fragile than I thought. My WD drive is well out of warranty. I think I will crack open the case and see if the platters are intact since I have no idea what caused my drive failure. Thanks for the tech lesson!
Thanks for posting. Just for folks to be aware, if you intend to open a HDD, you need to do it in a clean environment. Airborne dust is sufficient to cause problems when it settles on the platter. Finger prints on the platter are a disaster. Cover your hair and clothing, wear neoprene (or touch sensitive) gloves. Generally parts (such as heads) are not interchangeable. If there is annular scoring as in this example, other tracks/ sectors may be readable. If he scoring is a spiral, that crosses all data tracks and renders the drive scrap metal. You need good light and the steady hands of a surgeon. :) :)
Actually, the read heads are somewhat easy to replace. They have sort of a springy head so the reader can be repelled by the individual magnetic pulls. That springiness also allows for flexibility between platter thicknesses. and that thing about the formatting, all read heads I've seen are the same, they all same amount of turns in the copper coil, and no chip. This means the only electronics in it is the ribbon wire, coil, and heads. The chip that controls the movement is either on a board inside the enclosure, or on the outer board. To make a long story short, just unplug the reader, unscrew the plastic guide thing that keeps the heads from going too far from the platter, remove the top neodymium magnet, and remove the read heads. Installation: Unless you plan to save the platters, you don't have to worry about scratching them when removing the heads, just don't let it touch the ones in the new drive. To install them, just do the same thing to remove the damaged heads, then slide the new ones into the plastic guide and screw it down and it should be good to go. Just don't forget to put the magnet back and plug the read head in to the board. Edit: Nvm, I guess there's more to it then that: ua-cam.com/video/J9P4UadRdNA/v-deo.html Well, I was mostly right.
have a disk with me to know what happened to it and it no longer works and I want to fix it in the strongest coefficient where it is, I want what is inside it, it is very important to me, Can you show me the strongest coefficient for it
Wow, that's awesome. I'm thinking of doing this myself so I have got questions. Will it work if I swap the head using the same model, size, first 3 digits of serial number and same firmware version? If it will work, can I use hddsuperclone to clone the hard drive or I still have to use PC3000??
It is possible to recover data from a hard drive with this type of damage. You won't get information that is on the damaged part... but all other areas are recoverable. You just have to have data recovery software that will ignore the read error that you will get when it gets to the end of the drive... Basically, since the heads are damaged, they would be replaced... You will see what you can get before the new ones get damaged, replace the heads again, and start reading again... As long as you get a set of heads that survive going over the damaged area.. you'll get everything on the inner part of the drive that isn't damaged. Which from your video is about 90%-95% of the data. The alignment issues you are talking about are with the platters being aligned with each other. When you replace the heads, you use paper to keep them from crashing on each other... you then remove the paper seperaters as you seat the heads on the HDD platters.
no the damaged area would just damage the new set of heads put on the system, Also where it reads to seek and read track 0 is messed up, so it will never be able to become ready UNLESS u turn the head off that reads that platter unless all the platters have that damage.
most drives can be forced to read specific tracks with specialized interfaces and software, usually provided thru the manufacturer. this can allow retrieval of partial data from non damaged areas, but only if the heads are undamaged. if heads are non functional, some services have success by actually removing the disc platters and mounting them into a new case with good heads, much like a manufacturing process. inspection at microscope levels to determine suitability is essential before choosing what to do, as even minute surface defects will ruin subsequent heads that attempt access to those areas. most recover is a multistep process, first to enable reliable mechanical operation, then read as much data into an external image file, and finally parse the recovered image file for data structure and useable data. with many systems, the fragmentation of files is extensive and often very time consuming makingit difficult to recover individual consecutive data (however, even partial data can be useful)
I recently discovered your channel to see if I could possible save what I thought was a stuck head on my 2TB HDD and I was confident in opening the drive and unjamming the heads until I found out that all three of my platters had 3-5 rings of very deep scratches...moral of the story: remove your HDDs before transporting a PC
I have a Samsung 2.5" HDD, it literally flew and fell on hard floor (turned off), and then... it still worked flawlessly, and was still working last time I checked... But when turned on, even a light shock can mean goodbye for good.
the best thing is to use an ssd i have 4 hdds in my Alienware 17 r2 i have 1x(512gb m.2) and 2 (256gb m.2) and 1 (4tb hdd for steam. all my personal stuff is on a few 128gb sand disk usb drives. my pics and over important docs are on DVDs nobody uses them but they are the best my be slow at reading but will never fail unless you scratch them
The worked for me after two pc shops refused to open the unreadable hard drive. as soon as I opened the case and saw it wasn't in a parked position I figured it was stuck and rotated counterclockwise the disc while dragging the reader head back to parked position and that fixed it. Thanks for sharing!
@@idiosyncrazy1980 For an even dirtier fix put the drive on its side and give it a bump into a table. Worked for me, got the drive going but I thought it would work again after that which it did not.
Amazing info! Thank you very much! I have a ~7 yr old Seagate Barracuda 360GB hard disk, that fell sick few months ago (dunno how, never fell down or something). Luckily, i got a new WD 1TB on time and transferred 98% data safely to the new hdd. I was not able to run it for more than 20-30 mins (temps going 45C+ then BSOD) till 2 days ago when i discovered that it is making one clicking sound then fails to be detected at startup. I just backed up my data before the hdd died totally.
I have taken the lid off of a working hard drive and used it that way. It will work. Probably not very long. But I was able to read files etc. Not recommended for data recovery, but fun to see it work.
My several LaCie d2 / Quadras have NEVER fallen over! The base plate foot thing is wider than the drive housing! Drives always kept in a safe environment! Since 2007 < J.C.
Surely a head replacement would have helped get some data off the disc though? The head had scratched the disc yes so that data is gone obviously. However the head was also visibly damaged so replacing it (assuming the damage isn't on an important part of initialisation) should surely work in recovering some data? Or does any scratch to any part of any disc make it completely unreadable ?
You can't "force" the drive into the read position! Data recovery centres CAN recover data from such drives and it is likely they could have recovered the data off this drive, prior to dismantling.(obviously there will be some data that cannot be recovered where the heads have crashed into the platter). It does depend on the ability to use the original head (or if they can install new r/w heads). Recovery centres have specialised software to step the heads and control which track is read. The data DOES NOT have to align vertically between platters. There is some form of alignment based purely on the relationship between the heads and how they are mounted on the drive, but this has nothing to do with VERTICAL data alignment. Today's high capacity drives (usually) have logical allocations. This means the drive to the "end user" may be described for example as 2048 tracks and two r/w heads, while in practice, the physical device may have hardware that uses two platters and four heads. The computer requests the drive to write on track 1056, but the hard drive "logically" locates the appropriate track that "represents" track number 1056. This track could be on the second platter, read and written by head three. The computer does not need to know this logical allocation, this is handled by the embedded software on the hard drive.
Praise the lord and all mystic creatures! Not everybody (including the incompetent car mechanics in the video) is out of his mind. Fills me with hope for humanity. I can not understand why it's not obvious to everybody that 99.9% of the data on the drive was fine BEFORE that """""expert""""" violantly destroyed it while spitting out nonsense about sky being blue, motor rotates and knife doing scratchy noises. DJ Hard Disk in da house.
@@eugenkeller exactly LOL these noobs who dont know anything about data recovery talk bout head crashes like its the worst thing but guy at ontrack could recover 99% of data so easy even in bad hc cases
THank you so much man! I don't know yet if this will work for me, but thanks for explaining what are REALLY the risks to open the HD... vs almost all experts as you said who just say "no ! don't try !!!! you gonna lose all!!"
I am watching the third video of your hdd help and I am asking my self why I didn't open any. Thank you for inspiration and for lot of helpful informations! :)
A WD5000AAKS came in a Fantom external harddrive I purchased. Will I be able to get the data off it as a bare drive connected to a USB to SATA adaptor without the electronics of Fantom enclosure?
Not sure I understand why the data would be unrecoverable. The ring would only represent only one track, right? Unless it's track #0 where the directory and allocation data is stored, but even then you would still have recoverable data.
Quick question. My heads look good. the platters have no rings or signs of damage. when I turn it on the heads start to move into the reading position and half way there they stop and pull back and a beep is made. i repeats this about 5 times and then turns its self off. any help? please and thank you!!!
Danielle Becerra he just told you in this video to NOT turn your disk on when the lid is off :/ how do you know they was in that position when it was on? you kind of screwed this one up :(
+Thomas Matikainen That it's a bad idea to turn it on with the lid off doesn't mean that the contents are necessarily destroyed in the process - merely that the risk is greater.
A serious data recovery company will charge an extra fee just to thoroughly and carefully clean the platters in a case like this, when the cover has already been removed in a dusty environment... Attempting a recovery with dusty platters is a recipe for disaster.
Nice job guys, do I have got questions. Will it work if I swap the head using the same model, size, first 3 digits of serial number and same firmware version? If it will work, can I use hddsuperclone to clone the hard drive or I still have to use PC3000??
after a head crash, I would expect the head(s) to be "junk", so I would not expect them to work, even on undamaged parts of the disk; in the old days, with ferromagnetic coating, one could easily see the "furrow" that was ploughed by the head, and examining the head would also show the magnetic material clogging and/or having scratched up the head(s); good explanation, great video! BTW, I don't think you have to align "bits" on the surfaces, they would automagically align when the disks are reformatted (deep, including timing tracks); a bigger problem IMO would be (re)balancing the disks on the spindle, to avoid "wobble" when they turn at high speed? probably the falling over caused ALL of the "top" heads to "bounce" off the surface, and start pushing up material
I wonder if someone could give me some advice, bought a new 2tb hard drive fitted it a year ago, used it as a storage dump for media. A few days ago, it made some really loud grinding sounds. Later when I checked my drives, the E drive was gone on windows, but I could see it in disk management. The 2tb volume of the drive then read as 3.68 GB, when trying to fix the problem, it came up as ‘i/o device error’. Tried CMD to see if I could work the problem and got ‘Cannot Open Volume for Direct Access’ on that. The drive was only half full which surprised me re volume, nothing I have tried worked. When I use device manager, it says the drive is working properly when it patently isn’t. Would this suggest that the drive is dead? Any help would be appreciated.
nice video, i have a question, to start i am not new and computers and setting up systems, the new system i set up has 1 4tb, 1 6tb, (1 8tb 3 10tb,helium filled ) i get a sound from one don't know which one it sound is like ( b...b...b...b ..b) like the drives head is moving, but no disk activity as for moving files, all drives smart look good not bug or faults, only as the case is on the desk i hear this or i would never as in the bast the case is on the floor. would this be a normal sound and is there a web page i can go to that have a list of hard drive sounds.
the reason its scraping or making that sound when you're turning the disk with it powered off and the head is on the disk, is that when its powered up the air creates a path inbetween the head and the disk which makes it kind of float. kinda like an air hockey table.
Not sure if platter replacement is completely impossible, hard drive always uses one head at once and i guess it compensates misalignment and eccentricity a little during rotation. But it's just my guess. I believe tracks are too dense to be able to make hard drive perfect mechanically.
That is not the same as a permanently dead drive, Just shows you do NOT know what you are talking about. You can run a sector by sector recovery of that drive if you move the disk to a different drive case with undamaged heads. I have done it. Anything on that scratch is indeed dead. The heads cannot read because the heads are scratched to hell. The statement "Heads being stuck is not an issue because it is desktop drive" is false. as soon as that happens you risk it damaging sectors. And platter replacement being impossible is ALSO false. It depends on the firmware and the way it writes. If it is on all levels at the same time or one disk at a time. And ive actually worked with IBAS (one of the best recovery firms in the world) Who'm have recovered a disk after it was microwaved at 78% recovery, recovering vital evidence in a case. Formating has nothing to do with being able to replace heads or not. That would be Firmware and start sectors/Boot sector (Not the PC boot but the Harddrive boot sector) Heads are not related to that. Heads are interchangeable. Plates are interchangeable (IF YOU HAVE THE SAME FIRMWARE ON BOTH!!)
Mathias Westerlund yeah i gave an recovery answer longer up this post,, totally right,, he could have taken a sector by sector recovery on this disk, only about 2% of this disk was ACTUALLY damaged :P
Mathias Westerlund i said 0 % chance,, but that was for the man in the street,, DONT try this if you cant fix a toaster,, or boil water,, its a risky business,, but you have to know what you are doing,, but swapping the plates,, its just not worth it anymore,,
Mathias Westerlund , please tell me how. I can’t lose my data. My data is all I have of my kids right now. From an old external Toshiba 1trb. Please. I don’t have much.
I'm wondering why you did not try to recover any data? I had the exact same HDD shown here. It stopped reading any data. So I opened it the same as you. No visual damage was there, but I did make the mistake of turning it on to see if it spins. It did, and the heads went crazy. I put it back together and was able to recover 90% of the data. Somehow opening it let it work again for enough time to copy/paste data to another drive.
Two identical Seagate 2.5-inch SATA2 HDs (kept in reserve storage for about five years) now demonstrate the same noise-- a faint, two-per-second beep, but no click. Almost as though the motor is switched on, encounters stiction, and is immediately switched off to avoid motor damage. Immediately afterward, the startup cycle repeats. There is no discernible break between cycles, only continuous two-per-second beeping. Presuming stiction is the problem, here are two questions. (1) Since opening the drives (with no data on them) is a death-sentence, do you know of any other way to dislodge heads attached to the platter surface by "stiction"? Since there is no data of value involved, I am willing to do anything short of causing a head crash, gouging the platter recording surface. (2) The modern HD head is supposed to park itself automatically on power--down. One of these virgin drives was briefly tested on delivery, and then shut down in an orderly fashion, with no bumping or motion for at least 15 seconds. Under such circumstances, the head should have parked itself, and not have been in contact with the platter surface, at all. The other drive was never unpacked, but its should have been issued by the factory with its head in parked position, as well. So, how could stiction have occurred?
If "stiction" is the issue and these drives are of the type that park their heads on a special zone of the platters designed for landing (vs offload drive types), then in theory, you can dislodge them using external force. You will need to identify which direction the head stack assembly swings and where in the drive the heads land. Most likely it parks near the center of the platter (small radius). You can then, with the drive powered down, apply a small force in the direction that will cause the head stack to over center. By contrast, you do not want to apply a force in the opposite direction as that will cause the heads to rotate out into the data area. Given the assumptions I have made, if the right force is applied in the right direction, the heads will be jarred loose allowing the drive to spinup next time it is powered up. Keep in mind, this is very risky, but theoretically possible.
Nice video with good explanation delivered with patience. I liked everything but liked most the bit where you made effort to improve camera focus so the heads became clearly visible.
Thanks for sharing - although I am late to the party. I have a the Western Digital Caviar Green Power 500GB External Hard Disk Drive": It crashed in the year 2525 [ha got carried away in reference to a song] - it actually crashed in 2015! A local shop tech told me that the only way I could recover my data is by obtaining a identical enclosure controller board to read the data? I still have my WD 500GB external hard - I removed the case, but I didn't disassemble the drive itself. I guess I could give it a try again because my toolbox has improved - I own a Thermaltake - BlacX Duet Hard Drive Enclosure Docking Station - Black. any advice?
I have an external drive on a mac that's not reading the files, you can hear the disc spinning, it also says drive has ejected on the screen, although i hadn't disconnected it , i really want to save whats on the drive
Hello Abraham,I had my external hard drive peeping. I opened it after watching your videos and took the head away from the platter. I closed it and tried it, but still peeps 4 or 5 times and it does not start or make any sound. Then it goes quite. It does not show on my computer and there is a message that comes out not recognized. Could you help me please?
Hi...What if my portable hard disk makes continuous clicking noise while it still can flash up my folders unfortunately cannot read or open any files at all. Should I attempt your stunt to manually park the head which I think I should keep this attempt to the last when all else fails to help. By the way my hard disk became faulty because of premature removal from USB. Hope you can help.
What are these dents seen at 0:25 on the side of the HDD caused from? I just received a HDD that has these dents and am not sure if I should return it.
Ok. A drive can be in any direction. As long as you don't move it when it's running, it's all good. Proof : "According to several manufacturers, mounting a 3/5″ hard drive horizontally, vertically, or sideways doesn’t affect the hard drive life significantly. These are statements taken from the hard drive literature at each manufacturer’s website; it’s four years old but things probably haven’t changed much. Hitachi: The drive will operate in all axes (6 directions). Performance and error rate will stay within specification limits if the drive is operated in the other orientations from which it was formatted. Western Digital: Physical mounting of the drive: WD drives will function normally whether they are mounted sideways or upside down (any X, Y, Z orientation). Maxtor: The hard drive can be mounted in any orientation. Samsung: As long as it is securely attached to the chassis, hard disk drives may be mounted either horizontally or vertically depending on how your computer’s case is constructed."
But, if for example you don't run a drive laying down (horizontal), you are adding a very slight stress on the head because they are designed to move horizontally. It takes less energy to make the heads travel horizontally than vertically. (The difference is way too small to be significant). But i would never make the claim that running hard drives in any other ways beside horizontally, will lead to a hard drive failure. That's just rubbish.
Enjoyed watching it taken apart but it appeared to me that you could still retrieve a large part of the data that wasn't scratched. Isn't the large unscratched sections still recorded data? Or is the only data on the disc the smaller outer section from where the scratch occured? I'm just curious if there is a way to recover SOME or the undamaged data, and if not, should we hang on to our platters or hard drives incase technology comes up with a way to do so. Thanks for the learning lesson on damage and disassembly.
Way after anyone probably cares given SSDs but the answer is a big "Well..." The fact is there are companies that do computer forensics and have the equipment to do this. It is astronomically expensive and what you get out of it is going to usually be underwhelming. A few things complicate it aside from what is mentioned in the video. Big one is that as this head was swinging back and forth desperately trying to find the FAT or whatever, it was also sandpapering the surface of the disc. While it might look undamaged there are probably unreadable sections scratched all over each track. Some types of files like images may be at least partially recoverable.
@@tee2567man you’re completely delusional, after a head crash you can easily recover the data, you only wont be able to recover the data on the small portion of the platter where the head smashed, guys at ontrack do that on a daily basis
Hi, I have a digital western just like that but 1 terabyte.The problem is the progrmas for disks says it has corrupt firmware, writes and reads 14 kbs .it can somehow repair I'm not interested in the data I just want to use it again...Thank you.
Hi! I've got external hard drive Seagate FreeAgent Go 1TB. It's buzzing and clicking. My computer isn't finding its. I'm afraid about open hard drive. Have you got any advice?
My Freecom 500gb only dropped from foot high onto soft carpet and is broken. I took it apart and there are few light ring scratches on the disk. I took look at the head and is wire like old gramophone player needle that is causing the scratches. Looks like no hope right now of ever recovering data.
hi , my 1tb western digital drive gor dropped , dosent work anymore the heads are fine, but a plastick piece is stuck on the platters, can i take off 1 platter so i can clean the other one? or it will cause dataloss forever?
if you even get the platter off even microscopic inches, your data recovery will give you nothing. they have such a small alignment that you can never remove just one. tools are needed to pull the platters off without moving them at all. Thats why it costs 5000-10000$ to do a data recovery.
***** After taking that piece of plastic out , it come from the heads lock thing, appers to work, gives a status bad backup and replace error, however data is still readable but its slower
hello, had tried opening my WD hard drive and found that the heads are not stuck but it cant read or be recognised. when i plug it in, it starts rotating with no noise but after some seconds, theres a small clicking sound that start and the rotation slows down and eventually stops. how can i fix this?
They said the heads don't touch the surface of the disc while spinning because the air friction slightly lift it up but at 5:35 I can hear noise when it reaches the scratch area which means the heads are in contact with the disc while reading data.
1) The cover is off, as the guy said (one of the few smart things he said in this video) it might mess up the air flow which is required for the heads to fly above the platters - at an extremely small distance though. 2) The deep scratches alter the platters' surface, creating irregularities which look small with the naked eye but are enormous compared with the heads' size and the distance at which they normally fly over the platters - just imagine a Formula 1 car driving on a volcanic landscape...
Nice Video !. I have a pair of bad HDD and I wonder how to make them spin and also make the actuator moves back and forth, my intention is to put it on a display without the cover without connecting to a computer just power, and then see the disk spin and the actuator moves . thanks
I have the same problem... I purchased a 4tb Seagate external drive, I then proceeded to transfer 20 years of data from 4 smaller external hard drives, totalling around 3tb, onto it. I formatted each one as I finished & used them for other things.. About a week later I was vacuuming, caught the external drives power lead under a table, this caused the drive to fall 2" onto its side & it immediately emitted a nasty screaming/grinding/rotating noise, in the same way that one is.. I strongly suspect my platters now look exactly the same as your one.. I will open it at some point to see, I`ve been avoiding it as I`m kinda hoping it will miraculously fix itself, even though I`m 99% sure its now permanently dead. The moral of the story is, always back things up at least twice... I also think I`ll be wrapping my external drives in a couple of layers of bubblewrap in future, just in case..
Indeed that was kinda foolish, to have the opportunity to make a proper backup (having the data on one device only is _not_ a backup), and yet use the older HDDs to hord moar data, probably less worthwhile than those 3TB... You could have recovered part of the older data from those still working drives, depending on how much new data had been written on them since. The damaged HDD could still be partially recovered by a professional data recovery company, if you haven't made a foolish attempt to open it in dusty environment and screw it up for good, but of course it would cost a lotta money, about a whore's day (depending on where you are located it might even be worth ten days of a whore's work, or a kidney).
Mine was clicking, scratching and beeping. Attempted to reset the head placement but it didn't need that as the heads were in place. Looking at the top platter #1 of 3, I see that there are at least 9 scored rings around the top platter going down about 1 inch to the center from outside edge. There are a few metal shavings on the platter too. When I look at the heads. I can see that there is a bent one. Looking at the other heads I one of them looks like a preying mantis at the side waiting for it's prey. It's literally 5 mm off the heads and touching the bottom of the HDD case. Needless to say I'm not very optimistic in getting this fixed!
Great video ! I had to open my disc and the good news is that the plate seems to be ok but unfortunately i saw one small piece of the heads, as you have said i do not believe it will be possible to replace the heads to read the plates, but what do i need to do to recover mi data? do I have to remove the plates and put them on another same model drive? is there any other way? thanks in advance.
How do you know by the sound that the head is not stuck on the plate? Or a spindle won't spin? How do you decide to replace the panel..... The noise sounds the same to me :-/
hi Abraham I have a similar drice WD external old and it stop starting up. so I went to the store and bought an external box Insignia for sata external hard drive the lids on the new box were on but the hard drive did not start what can I do?
I just want to make a little correction that HDD is a western digital caviar green.They are used in USB devices and regular PC's i have one of these Hard drives.
What is the average cost of data recovery? Also, what is the best place, with the best price, to fix my WD external 500GB drive? My drive was dropped. It clicks, like it wants to run, but it won't. Please advise.
i have a AcomData 500GB PureDrive External Hard Drive - USB/eSATA and havent use it for a while turned it on today and i get blinking blue and red light. now I probably use it like 5 times never dropped it can you help me. I all my sons baby images in it.
Can someone help me....I’ve got an external hdd that clicks and beeps. Took the lid off and the heads are at home position already. No damage to the discs at all as far as I can see....I was told it might need a new pcb board...
hi there. my phone just fell on my drive yesterday and is not reading!! i already open looks like the sliver disc is stretch there is like circle around the disc😞. what can i do? i need your help
My hard drive sort of clicks and doesn't recognize, so I opened it up and the platter looks super clean and fine. However, the end of the thing (IDK the name, I think you call them disks) that goes over the platter is cracked at the head. I assume this is very very bad and that means it's over.. The head of the "disk" the very pointy part on the end, is like cracked and almost bent.
How cool was to watch this vid... made with patience, care and taking us with you in the curiosity of checking every single piece... thank you for the trip, congrats for a great vid!
When I leave Windows Explorer and I only use the browser and other tasks the hard drive works well but suddenly When I go back to Windows Explorer to find and open any file my hard drive makes a noise like a click and then there's a seconds of sluggish to explorer through files and after these seconds the Windows Explorer staring to work on a normal situation, so I want your help. What do you do to fix this problem? (ps: I have and evo 850 ssd and a hard drive 1tb).
What if i have a HDD that doesn't click but just powers off after a little while... How could i fix that ? It's not detected by anything. Just... Powers off after ~30 seconds. Actually, it turns on, i hear it spins. Then stops. Restarts once more on its own, powers off. Then nothing.
Hi I have a hardisk with the Rom (Bios burned - in the sense that PCB's rom is missing) Reason I had buying a card to do the swapping but the repairman lost the original card) Do you think it is possible to recover my Seagate Hardisk? In short, the HD has never been opened and card that has does not have the original BIOS I feel the engine turns but it doesn't see any data windows with new pcb donnor Thx Franco Italy
If you have PHYS (physical) damage then the drive each run could be last. So recovering bad sectors is ludicrous. Need to run FTK images or DD and image what's left
gosh i just opened my hdd after it died on me yesterday & its so bad inside, whole disk plattersis covered in black resedue, the filter thingy is soaking black... is it repairable? i mean can get any data out of it?
![Lp. Сердце Вселенной #60 РОЖДЕНИЕ ЛОЛОЛОШКИ [Финал] • Майнкрафт](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/YoR0pAV9FVQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I like that you’re honest. Most data recovery service dudes will act as if opening your hard drive will cause permanent damage just so you can call them for help and pay up.
These fucking data recovery dudes are mad pei , they let down all of your hopes and asking stupid questions and doesn't have guts to except the challenge , ones they heard about you did open your hard drive ,that's it " I am not touching it " world end up, life is under the thread , I am dying , I m blind , I say keep opening bloody hard disk ,you one day learns things.
can you be more specific? Sounds like by "data recovery service" you mean that guy in the video.
@@khurramsa5133 Why did you open your hard drive?
y’all delusional and cringe 🤣🤣🤣 guys at kroll ontrack could recover anything u just dont know shi bout data recovery
because in the shell is their treasury
Fascinating to see how these devices work. They are more fragile than I thought. My WD drive is well out of warranty. I think I will crack open the case and see if the platters are intact since I have no idea what caused my drive failure. Thanks for the tech lesson!
Thanks for posting. Just for folks to be aware, if you intend to open a HDD, you need to do it in a clean environment. Airborne dust is sufficient to cause problems when it settles on the platter. Finger prints on the platter are a disaster. Cover your hair and clothing, wear neoprene (or touch sensitive) gloves. Generally parts (such as heads) are not interchangeable. If there is annular scoring as in this example, other tracks/ sectors may be readable. If he scoring is a spiral, that crosses all data tracks and renders the drive scrap metal. You need good light and the steady hands of a surgeon. :) :)
the disk is now history, and you are the best history teacher ever. Thanks dude.
Actually, the read heads are somewhat easy to replace. They have sort of a springy head so the reader can be repelled by the individual magnetic pulls. That springiness also allows for flexibility between platter thicknesses. and that thing about the formatting, all read heads I've seen are the same, they all same amount of turns in the copper coil, and no chip. This means the only electronics in it is the ribbon wire, coil, and heads. The chip that controls the movement is either on a board inside the enclosure, or on the outer board.
To make a long story short, just unplug the reader, unscrew the plastic guide thing that keeps the heads from going too far from the platter, remove the top neodymium magnet, and remove the read heads.
Installation: Unless you plan to save the platters, you don't have to worry about scratching them when removing the heads, just don't let it touch the ones in the new drive. To install them, just do the same thing to remove the damaged heads, then slide the new ones into the plastic guide and screw it down and it should be good to go. Just don't forget to put the magnet back and plug the read head in to the board.
Edit: Nvm, I guess there's more to it then that: ua-cam.com/video/J9P4UadRdNA/v-deo.html
Well, I was mostly right.
have a disk with me to know what happened to it and it no longer works and I want to fix it in the strongest coefficient where it is, I want what is inside it, it is very important to me, Can you show me the strongest coefficient for it
Wow, that's awesome. I'm thinking of doing this myself so I have got questions. Will it work if I swap the head using the same model, size, first 3 digits of serial number and same firmware version?
If it will work, can I use hddsuperclone to clone the hard drive or I still have to use PC3000??
It is possible to recover data from a hard drive with this type of damage. You won't get information that is on the damaged part... but all other areas are recoverable. You just have to have data recovery software that will ignore the read error that you will get when it gets to the end of the drive... Basically, since the heads are damaged, they would be replaced... You will see what you can get before the new ones get damaged, replace the heads again, and start reading again... As long as you get a set of heads that survive going over the damaged area.. you'll get everything on the inner part of the drive that isn't damaged. Which from your video is about 90%-95% of the data.
The alignment issues you are talking about are with the platters being aligned with each other.
When you replace the heads, you use paper to keep them from crashing on each other... you then remove the paper seperaters as you seat the heads on the HDD platters.
Which kind of software? Any recommendation, Welcome. Thanks
no if the controller can't pass the POST!, that kind of damage is a dead one. Atleast not using the original controllers, but a hacked one
no the damaged area would just damage the new set of heads put on the system, Also where it reads to seek and read track 0 is messed up, so it will never be able to become ready UNLESS u turn the head off that reads that platter unless all the platters have that damage.
In a case like this a live PCB swap could do the trick - see the presentation from Scott Moulton ad DefCon15.
most drives can be forced to read specific tracks with specialized interfaces and software, usually provided thru the manufacturer. this can allow retrieval of partial data from non damaged areas, but only if the heads are undamaged. if heads are non functional, some services have success by actually removing the disc platters and mounting them into a new case with good heads, much like a manufacturing process. inspection at microscope levels to determine suitability is essential before choosing what to do, as even minute surface defects will ruin subsequent heads that attempt access to those areas. most recover is a multistep process, first to enable reliable mechanical operation, then read as much data into an external image file, and finally parse the recovered image file for data structure and useable data.
with many systems, the fragmentation of files is extensive and often very time consuming makingit difficult to recover individual consecutive data (however, even partial data can be useful)
I am sorry it couldn' t be repaired, but thank you for showing us the internal mechanics of the hard drive! That was really interesting!
I recently discovered your channel to see if I could possible save what I thought was a stuck head on my 2TB HDD and I was confident in opening the drive and unjamming the heads until I found out that all three of my platters had 3-5 rings of very deep scratches...moral of the story: remove your HDDs before transporting a PC
nah, if you shut down the PC the heads should go into the "parking space", where small vibrations are not going to damage them.
I have a Samsung 2.5" HDD, it literally flew and fell on hard floor (turned off), and then... it still worked flawlessly, and was still working last time I checked... But when turned on, even a light shock can mean goodbye for good.
the best thing is to use an ssd i have 4 hdds in my Alienware 17 r2 i have 1x(512gb m.2) and 2 (256gb m.2) and 1 (4tb hdd for steam. all my personal stuff is on a few 128gb sand disk usb drives. my pics and over important docs are on DVDs nobody uses them but they are the best my be slow at reading but will never fail unless you scratch them
The worked for me after two pc shops refused to open the unreadable hard drive. as soon as I opened the case and saw it wasn't in a parked position I figured it was stuck and rotated counterclockwise the disc while dragging the reader head back to parked position and that fixed it. Thanks for sharing!
Well, and then, what happened ? Could you recover everything ?
How long did it work properly after that quick and dirty fix ?
@@idiosyncrazy1980 For an even dirtier fix put the drive on its side and give it a bump into a table. Worked for me, got the drive going but I thought it would work again after that which it did not.
After 6 days of scanning hdd wd red 2tb that fell of the table now I hear clicking noise... gonna buy new one to try this. Thank you
Amazing info! Thank you very much!
I have a ~7 yr old Seagate Barracuda 360GB hard disk, that fell sick few months ago (dunno how, never fell down or something). Luckily, i got a new WD 1TB on time and transferred 98% data safely to the new hdd. I was not able to run it for more than 20-30 mins (temps going 45C+ then BSOD) till 2 days ago when i discovered that it is making one clicking sound then fails to be detected at startup.
I just backed up my data before the hdd died totally.
That's because you're Batman!
Arvin Ardakani
Well, you know.. being billionaire, having batcomputer, and being batman... still have to face common problems :S
Mine is making that same clicking noise too. I was able to recover some data from it but it seems my photos are lost.
@@trulygrateful7217 Ah! :(
I have taken the lid off of a working hard drive and used it that way. It will work. Probably not very long. But I was able to read files etc. Not recommended for data recovery, but fun to see it work.
My several LaCie d2 / Quadras have NEVER fallen over!
The base plate foot thing is wider than the drive housing!
Drives always kept in a safe environment!
Since 2007 <
J.C.
Yes true. Some small percentage of the data is gone, but chances are you can restore most of it in a lab. At least 80%.
how?
@@jerichoular7837 probably only an MRI, very expensive process
@@JerrodJohnsonD lol
This is so satisfying, i would watch this before going to bed.
Surely a head replacement would have helped get some data off the disc though? The head had scratched the disc yes so that data is gone obviously. However the head was also visibly damaged so replacing it (assuming the damage isn't on an important part of initialisation) should surely work in recovering some data? Or does any scratch to any part of any disc make it completely unreadable ?
You can't "force" the drive into the read position! Data recovery centres CAN recover data from such drives and it is likely they could have recovered the data off this drive, prior to dismantling.(obviously there will be some data that cannot be recovered where the heads have crashed into the platter). It does depend on the ability to use the original head (or if they can install new r/w heads). Recovery centres have specialised software to step the heads and control which track is read. The data DOES NOT have to align vertically between platters. There is some form of alignment based purely on the relationship between the heads and how they are mounted on the drive, but this has nothing to do with VERTICAL data alignment.
Today's high capacity drives (usually) have logical allocations. This means the drive to the "end user" may be described for example as 2048 tracks and two r/w heads, while in practice, the physical device may have hardware that uses two platters and four heads. The computer requests the drive to write on track 1056, but the hard drive "logically" locates the appropriate track that "represents" track number 1056. This track could be on the second platter, read and written by head three. The computer does not need to know this logical allocation, this is handled by the embedded software on the hard drive.
Praise the lord and all mystic creatures! Not everybody (including the incompetent car mechanics in the video) is out of his mind. Fills me with hope for humanity.
I can not understand why it's not obvious to everybody that 99.9% of the data on the drive was fine BEFORE that """""expert""""" violantly destroyed it while spitting out nonsense about sky being blue, motor rotates and knife doing scratchy noises. DJ Hard Disk in da house.
@@eugenkeller exactly LOL
these noobs who dont know anything about data recovery talk bout head crashes like its the worst thing but guy at ontrack could recover 99% of data so easy even in bad hc cases
THank you so much man! I don't know yet if this will work for me, but thanks for explaining what are REALLY the risks to open the HD... vs almost all experts as you said who just say "no ! don't try !!!! you gonna lose all!!"
12:34 you need to pull out that stopper (shape like a small black rod between the disk and the yellow stuff) so that the reader can pull out.
Buff the damage out with a dremel or successively finer grades of wet'n'dry.
+GaryChap lets hope nobody actually believes this xD
No idiot
Halen Martini HE IS KIDDING.
regarding Halen Martini, sarcasm is high level of humour, it has a limited audience, is not for everyone
Onc cannot sense sarcasm without _at leaset_ a *slight* hint that it is sarcasm. The OP did *Not* hint at sarcasm.
Excellent video of what to do, and what NOT to do if attempting this type of repair.
I am watching the third video of your hdd help and I am asking my self why I didn't open any. Thank you for inspiration and for lot of helpful informations! :)
what if you turn the disk upside down and reassembly it, could it read the data?
It's always interesting to know the expert's opinion.
Yes, but you did not hear one in this video ! :^p
A WD5000AAKS came in a Fantom external harddrive I purchased. Will I be able to get the data off it as a bare drive connected to a USB to SATA adaptor without the electronics of Fantom enclosure?
So the noise coming from my computer is where I thought it was. Thanks for showing us this video.
I put HD magnets on the bottom of my engine oil filter to catch any metal particles if any are floating around.
what have i to do if my hard drive is clicking and when it clicks the Pc didn't finds it?.... please help me my hard drive is a toshiba 720gb
Not sure I understand why the data would be unrecoverable. The ring would only represent only one track, right? Unless it's track #0 where the directory and allocation data is stored, but even then you would still have recoverable data.
Quick question. My heads look good. the platters have no rings or signs of damage. when I turn it on the heads start to move into the reading position and half way there they stop and pull back and a beep is made. i repeats this about 5 times and then turns its self off. any help? please and thank you!!!
Danielle Becerra he just told you in this video to NOT turn your disk on when the lid is off :/ how do you know they was in that position when it was on? you kind of screwed this one up :(
+Danielle Becerra may be the control, board
+Thomas Matikainen That it's a bad idea to turn it on with the lid off doesn't mean that the contents are necessarily destroyed in the process - merely that the risk is greater.
A serious data recovery company will charge an extra fee just to thoroughly and carefully clean the platters in a case like this, when the cover has already been removed in a dusty environment... Attempting a recovery with dusty platters is a recipe for disaster.
Nice job guys, do I have got questions. Will it work if I swap the head using the same model, size, first 3 digits of serial number and same firmware version?
If it will work, can I use hddsuperclone to clone the hard drive or I still have to use PC3000??
after a head crash, I would expect the head(s) to be "junk", so I would not expect them to work, even on undamaged parts of the disk; in the old days, with ferromagnetic coating, one could easily see the "furrow" that was ploughed by the head, and examining the head would also show the magnetic material clogging and/or having scratched up the head(s); good explanation, great video! BTW, I don't think you have to align "bits" on the surfaces, they would automagically align when the disks are reformatted (deep, including timing tracks); a bigger problem IMO would be (re)balancing the disks on the spindle, to avoid "wobble" when they turn at high speed? probably the falling over caused ALL of the "top" heads to "bounce" off the surface, and start pushing up material
I wonder if someone could give me some advice, bought a new 2tb hard drive fitted it a year ago, used it as a storage dump for media. A few days ago, it made some really loud grinding sounds. Later when I checked my drives, the E drive was gone on windows, but I could see it in disk management. The 2tb volume of the drive then read as 3.68 GB, when trying to fix the problem, it came up as ‘i/o device error’. Tried CMD to see if I could work the problem and got ‘Cannot Open Volume for Direct Access’ on that. The drive was only half full which surprised me re volume, nothing I have tried worked. When I use device manager, it says the drive is working properly when it patently isn’t. Would this suggest that the drive is dead? Any help would be appreciated.
what size torx was used to remove the platter ring at 10:37 on...i can seem to find on in my kit that fits?( same WD 500 gig drive it appears)
Hi.
My needle/head goes back and forth and it looks like the disc doesn't spin at full speed. I can't read the harddrive on my PC. Any ideas? Regards
Maybe swap controller board (pcb) with one from donor drive of same manufacture and factory.
nice video, i have a question, to start i am not new and computers and setting up systems,
the new system i set up has 1 4tb, 1 6tb, (1 8tb 3 10tb,helium filled ) i get a sound from one don't know which one it sound is like ( b...b...b...b ..b) like the drives head is moving, but no disk activity as for moving files, all drives smart look good not bug or faults, only as the case is on the desk i hear this or i would never as in the bast the case is on the floor. would this be a normal sound and is there a web page i can go to that have a list of hard drive sounds.
the reason its scraping or making that sound when you're turning the disk with it powered off and the head is on the disk, is that when its powered up the air creates a path inbetween the head and the disk which makes it kind of float. kinda like an air hockey table.
Not sure if platter replacement is completely impossible, hard drive always uses one head at once and i guess it compensates misalignment and eccentricity a little during rotation. But it's just my guess. I believe tracks are too dense to be able to make hard drive perfect mechanically.
That is not the same as a permanently dead drive, Just shows you do NOT know what you are talking about. You can run a sector by sector recovery of that drive if you move the disk to a different drive case with undamaged heads.
I have done it. Anything on that scratch is indeed dead. The heads cannot read because the heads are scratched to hell.
The statement "Heads being stuck is not an issue because it is desktop drive" is false. as soon as that happens you risk it damaging sectors.
And platter replacement being impossible is ALSO false.
It depends on the firmware and the way it writes. If it is on all levels at the same time or one disk at a time.
And ive actually worked with IBAS (one of the best recovery firms in the world) Who'm have recovered a disk after it was microwaved at 78% recovery, recovering vital evidence in a case.
Formating has nothing to do with being able to replace heads or not. That would be Firmware and start sectors/Boot sector (Not the PC boot but the Harddrive boot sector)
Heads are not related to that. Heads are interchangeable.
Plates are interchangeable (IF YOU HAVE THE SAME FIRMWARE ON BOTH!!)
Mathias Westerlund yeah i gave an recovery answer longer up this post,, totally right,, he could have taken a sector by sector recovery on this disk, only about 2% of this disk was ACTUALLY damaged :P
Mathias Westerlund i said 0 % chance,, but that was for the man in the street,, DONT try this if you cant fix a toaster,, or boil water,, its a risky business,, but you have to know what you are doing,, but swapping the plates,, its just not worth it anymore,,
please i need a help in recovering my data on my hard drive can you help me?
Mathias Westerlund , please tell me how. I can’t lose my data. My data is all I have of my kids right now. From an old external Toshiba 1trb. Please. I don’t have much.
I'm wondering why you did not try to recover any data? I had the exact same HDD shown here. It stopped reading any data. So I opened it the same as you. No visual damage was there, but I did make the mistake of turning it on to see if it spins. It did, and the heads went crazy. I put it back together and was able to recover 90% of the data. Somehow opening it let it work again for enough time to copy/paste data to another drive.
Two identical Seagate 2.5-inch SATA2 HDs (kept in reserve storage for about five years) now demonstrate the same noise-- a faint, two-per-second beep, but no click. Almost as though the motor is switched on, encounters stiction, and is immediately switched off to avoid motor damage. Immediately afterward, the startup cycle repeats. There is no discernible break between cycles, only continuous two-per-second beeping.
Presuming stiction is the problem, here are two questions.
(1) Since opening the drives (with no data on them) is a death-sentence, do you know of any other way to dislodge heads attached to the platter surface by "stiction"? Since there is no data of value involved, I am willing to do anything short of causing a head crash, gouging the platter recording surface.
(2) The modern HD head is supposed to park itself automatically on power--down. One of these virgin drives was briefly tested on delivery, and then shut down in an orderly fashion, with no bumping or motion for at least 15 seconds. Under such circumstances, the head should have parked itself, and not have been in contact with the platter surface, at all. The other drive was never unpacked, but its should have been issued by the factory with its head in parked position, as well. So, how could stiction have occurred?
If "stiction" is the issue and these drives are of the type that park their heads on a special zone of the platters designed for landing (vs offload drive types), then in theory, you can dislodge them using external force. You will need to identify which direction the head stack assembly swings and where in the drive the heads land. Most likely it parks near the center of the platter (small radius). You can then, with the drive powered down, apply a small force in the direction that will cause the head stack to over center. By contrast, you do not want to apply a force in the opposite direction as that will cause the heads to rotate out into the data area. Given the assumptions I have made, if the right force is applied in the right direction, the heads will be jarred loose allowing the drive to spinup next time it is powered up. Keep in mind, this is very risky, but theoretically possible.
Nice video with good explanation delivered with patience. I liked everything but liked most the bit where you made effort to improve camera focus so the heads became clearly visible.
Is it possible to install the disc in another driver, JUST the disc
Yes but U have to be very careful
Oh okay, I'll keep that in mind and yeah thanks
Thanks for sharing - although I am late to the party. I have a the Western Digital Caviar Green Power 500GB External Hard Disk Drive": It crashed in the year 2525 [ha got carried away in reference to a song] - it actually crashed in 2015! A local shop tech told me that the only way I could recover my data is by obtaining a identical enclosure controller board to read the data? I still have my WD 500GB external hard - I removed the case, but I didn't disassemble the drive itself. I guess I could give it a try again because my toolbox has improved - I own a Thermaltake - BlacX Duet Hard Drive Enclosure Docking Station - Black. any advice?
I have an external drive on a mac that's not reading the files, you can hear the disc spinning, it also says drive has ejected on the screen, although i hadn't disconnected it , i really want to save whats on the drive
Hello Abraham,I had my external hard drive peeping. I opened it after watching your videos and took the head away from the platter. I closed it and tried it, but still peeps 4 or 5 times and it does not start or make any sound. Then it goes quite. It does not show on my computer and there is a message that comes out not recognized. Could you help me please?
My drive looks very similar to this except the circle is toward the center. Is my data completely lost?
Hi...What if my portable hard disk makes continuous clicking noise while it still can flash up my folders unfortunately cannot read or open any files at all. Should I attempt your stunt to manually park the head which I think I should keep this attempt to the last when all else fails to help. By the way my hard disk became faulty because of premature removal from USB. Hope you can help.
What are these dents seen at 0:25 on the side of the HDD caused from? I just received a HDD that has these dents and am not sure if I should return it.
It's when they are wieleded by the manifactures nothing wrong
you have to use a high contrast background to help your camera focus something black and white for instance with crisp edges
my drive had this same damage. i sent it to data recovery and are able to recovered most of my data.
Where are recovering your data
Not true. Some small percentage of the data is gone, but chances are you can restore most of it in a lab. At least 80%.
Exactly, and he is just destroying customer data. If you cant repair, why screw it more? hand it to someone more experienced.
Ok. A drive can be in any direction. As long as you don't move it when it's running, it's all good.
Proof :
"According to several manufacturers, mounting a 3/5″ hard drive horizontally, vertically, or sideways doesn’t affect the hard drive life significantly.
These are statements taken from the hard drive literature at each manufacturer’s website; it’s four years old but things probably haven’t changed much.
Hitachi:
The drive will operate in all axes (6 directions). Performance and error rate will stay within specification limits if the drive is operated in the other orientations from which it was formatted.
Western Digital:
Physical mounting of the drive: WD drives will function normally whether they are mounted sideways or upside down (any X, Y, Z orientation).
Maxtor:
The hard drive can be mounted in any orientation.
Samsung:
As long as it is securely attached to the chassis, hard disk drives may be mounted either horizontally or vertically depending on how your computer’s case is constructed."
But, if for example you don't run a drive laying down (horizontal), you are adding a very slight stress on the head because they are designed to move horizontally. It takes less energy to make the heads travel horizontally than vertically. (The difference is way too small to be significant).
But i would never make the claim that running hard drives in any other ways beside horizontally, will lead to a hard drive failure. That's just rubbish.
Enjoyed watching it taken apart but it appeared to me that you could still retrieve a large part of the data that wasn't scratched. Isn't the large unscratched sections still recorded data? Or is the only data on the disc the smaller outer section from where the scratch occured? I'm just curious if there is a way to recover SOME or the undamaged data, and if not, should we hang on to our platters or hard drives incase technology comes up with a way to do so. Thanks for the learning lesson on damage and disassembly.
Way after anyone probably cares given SSDs but the answer is a big "Well..." The fact is there are companies that do computer forensics and have the equipment to do this. It is astronomically expensive and what you get out of it is going to usually be underwhelming. A few things complicate it aside from what is mentioned in the video. Big one is that as this head was swinging back and forth desperately trying to find the FAT or whatever, it was also sandpapering the surface of the disc. While it might look undamaged there are probably unreadable sections scratched all over each track. Some types of files like images may be at least partially recoverable.
@@tee2567man you’re completely delusional, after a head crash you can easily recover the data, you only wont be able to recover the data on the small portion of the platter where the head smashed, guys at ontrack do that on a daily basis
So if this would have fallen over while it WASN'T running, that'd have been less likely to cause issues, correct?
What size screws are those?. I have a clicking external seagate I want to take a look at.
Hi, I have a digital western just like that but 1 terabyte.The problem is the progrmas for disks says it has corrupt firmware, writes and reads 14 kbs .it can somehow repair I'm not interested in the data I just want to use it again...Thank you.
Hi! I've got external hard drive Seagate FreeAgent Go 1TB. It's buzzing and clicking. My computer isn't finding its. I'm afraid about open hard drive. Have you got any advice?
Can't you just replace the read/write heads? What about the data beyond the scratched area? Is that data not retrievable?
You should put the screw on the pivot of the moving arm that support the heads.
My Freecom 500gb only dropped from foot high onto soft carpet and is broken. I took it apart and there are few light ring scratches on the disk. I took look at the head and is wire like old gramophone player needle that is causing the scratches. Looks like no hope right now of ever recovering data.
hi , my 1tb western digital drive gor dropped , dosent work anymore the heads are fine, but a plastick piece is stuck on the platters, can i take off 1 platter so i can clean the other one? or it will cause dataloss forever?
You cannot. Removing one disk will result in a 100% loss because you can never ever get it back in the correct position.
1 in a million chance use compressed air for cleaning cameras to blow it away, be carefull of condensation
if you even get the platter off even microscopic inches, your data recovery will give you nothing. they have such a small alignment that you can never remove just one. tools are needed to pull the platters off without moving them at all. Thats why it costs 5000-10000$ to do a data recovery.
*****
After taking that piece of plastic out , it come from the heads lock thing, appers to work, gives a status bad backup and replace error, however data is still readable but its slower
Did this give you the dreaded In/out error, no bootable device found?
hello, had tried opening my WD hard drive and found that the heads are not stuck but it cant read or be recognised. when i plug it in, it starts rotating with no noise but after some seconds, theres a small clicking sound that start and the rotation slows down and eventually stops. how can i fix this?
They said the heads don't touch the surface of the disc while spinning because the air friction slightly lift it up but at 5:35 I can hear noise when it reaches the scratch area which means the heads are in contact with the disc while reading data.
1) The cover is off, as the guy said (one of the few smart things he said in this video) it might mess up the air flow which is required for the heads to fly above the platters - at an extremely small distance though.
2) The deep scratches alter the platters' surface, creating irregularities which look small with the naked eye but are enormous compared with the heads' size and the distance at which they normally fly over the platters - just imagine a Formula 1 car driving on a volcanic landscape...
Question: if you put one of those disks in a dvd player, could it read it?
Yeah
Nice Video !. I have a pair of bad HDD and I wonder how to make them spin and also make the actuator moves back and forth, my intention is to put it on a display without the cover without connecting to a computer just power, and then see the disk spin and the actuator moves . thanks
what are you using to take out that center at 11 mins , it looks like your turning it clockwise to undo the screws,, I can not undo mine.
I have the same problem... I purchased a 4tb Seagate external drive, I then proceeded to transfer 20 years of data from 4 smaller external hard drives, totalling around 3tb, onto it. I formatted each one as I finished & used them for other things.. About a week later I was vacuuming, caught the external drives power lead under a table, this caused the drive to fall 2" onto its side & it immediately emitted a nasty screaming/grinding/rotating noise, in the same way that one is..
I strongly suspect my platters now look exactly the same as your one.. I will open it at some point to see, I`ve been avoiding it as I`m kinda hoping it will miraculously fix itself, even though I`m 99% sure its now permanently dead.
The moral of the story is, always back things up at least twice...
I also think I`ll be wrapping my external drives in a couple of layers of bubblewrap in future, just in case..
Indeed that was kinda foolish, to have the opportunity to make a proper backup (having the data on one device only is _not_ a backup), and yet use the older HDDs to hord moar data, probably less worthwhile than those 3TB... You could have recovered part of the older data from those still working drives, depending on how much new data had been written on them since. The damaged HDD could still be partially recovered by a professional data recovery company, if you haven't made a foolish attempt to open it in dusty environment and screw it up for good, but of course it would cost a lotta money, about a whore's day (depending on where you are located it might even be worth ten days of a whore's work, or a kidney).
Noticed the head and players, question would it be possible to replace ( the same) players upside down as it appears only one side damaged??????
It's gonna damage the other side as well... lol
What’s the name of the screw driver you are using please ? I have the same issue 😢😩
Mine was clicking, scratching and beeping. Attempted to reset the head placement but it didn't need that as the heads were in place. Looking at the top platter #1 of 3, I see that there are at least 9 scored rings around the top platter going down about 1 inch to the center from outside edge. There are a few metal shavings on the platter too. When I look at the heads. I can see that there is a bent one. Looking at the other heads I one of them looks like a preying mantis at the side waiting for it's prey. It's literally 5 mm off the heads and touching the bottom of the HDD case.
Needless to say I'm not very optimistic in getting this fixed!
can a bad head cause the hard drive not to power up with a transfer power supply cable?
Great video ! I had to open my disc and the good news is that the plate seems to be ok but unfortunately i saw one small piece of the heads, as you have said i do not believe it will be possible to replace the heads to read the plates, but what do i need to do to recover mi data? do I have to remove the plates and put them on another same model drive? is there any other way? thanks in advance.
How do you know by the sound that the head is not stuck on the plate? Or a spindle won't spin? How do you decide to replace the panel..... The noise sounds the same to me :-/
Informative video..
Good job..
Keep it up and continue for learners..
Thanks..
Jzakallah..
hi Abraham I have a similar drice WD external old and it stop starting up. so I went to the store and bought an external box Insignia for sata external hard drive the lids on the new box were on but the hard drive did not start what can I do?
I just want to make a little correction that HDD is a western digital caviar green.They are used in USB devices and regular PC's i have one of these Hard drives.
What is the average cost of data recovery? Also, what is the best place, with the best price, to fix my WD external 500GB drive? My drive was dropped. It clicks, like it wants to run, but it won't. Please advise.
How about replacing the head instead of trying to swap the platters?
i have a AcomData 500GB PureDrive External Hard Drive - USB/eSATA and havent use it for a while turned it on today and i get blinking blue and red light. now I probably use it like 5 times never dropped it can you help me. I all my sons baby images in it.
Can someone help me....I’ve got an external hdd that clicks and beeps. Took the lid off and the heads are at home position already. No damage to the discs at all as far as I can see....I was told it might need a new pcb board...
very good information. i am a newbie and had no idea why my drive was making that exact noise
hi there. my phone just fell on my drive yesterday and is not reading!! i already open looks like the sliver disc is stretch there is like circle around the disc😞. what can i do? i need your help
The hard drive motor can be used as a stationary grinder. Done that several times.
Thank you for the extensive video. It was indeed informative and fascinating.
My hard drive sort of clicks and doesn't recognize, so I opened it up and the platter looks super clean and fine. However, the end of the thing (IDK the name, I think you call them disks) that goes over the platter is cracked at the head. I assume this is very very bad and that means it's over.. The head of the "disk" the very pointy part on the end, is like cracked and almost bent.
How cool was to watch this vid... made with patience, care and taking us with you in the curiosity of checking every single piece... thank you for the trip, congrats for a great vid!
can you put oil in the bearings of the disk so it wont get stuck again?
When I leave Windows Explorer and I only use the browser and other tasks the hard drive works well but suddenly When I go back to Windows Explorer to find and open any file my hard drive makes a noise like a click and then there's a seconds of sluggish to explorer through files and after these seconds the Windows Explorer staring to work on a normal situation, so I want your help. What do you do to fix this problem? (ps: I have and evo 850 ssd and a hard drive 1tb).
What if I accidentally scratched the disk with the star screwdriver?
Still possible retrieve data from this damaged surface if it really necessary.
An excellent tutorial of how to destroy a hard disk that still was recoverable.
What if i have a HDD that doesn't click but just powers off after a little while... How could i fix that ? It's not detected by anything.
Just... Powers off after ~30 seconds.
Actually, it turns on, i hear it spins. Then stops. Restarts once more on its own, powers off. Then nothing.
i have a 4tb that stopped connecting is there away to get the data out of it it makes a bit of a clicking noise from here and there
That little arm isn't going to the center and reading it, any help on that?
Hi I have a hardisk with the Rom (Bios burned - in the sense that PCB's rom is missing)
Reason I had buying a card to do the swapping but the repairman lost the original card)
Do you think it is possible to recover my Seagate Hardisk?
In short, the HD has never been opened and card that has does not have the original BIOS
I feel the engine turns but it doesn't see any data windows with new pcb donnor
Thx Franco Italy
What happens if you run HDAT2 check&repair on it? would it attempt to recover any good sectors?
If you have PHYS (physical) damage then the drive each run could be last. So recovering bad sectors is ludicrous. Need to run FTK images or DD and image what's left
gosh i just opened my hdd after it died on me yesterday & its so bad inside, whole disk plattersis covered in black resedue, the filter thingy is soaking black... is it repairable? i mean can get any data out of it?