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HDD data recovery (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have a HDD 4tb Toshiba drive I had in a Raid 1 NAS device (NSA320) that failed in the raid and I replaced it and rebuilt the raid and life was good.

I have finally moved to a better custom TrueNas scale setup with 2x 8tb HDD in a Raid 1 with weekly encrypted backups to online cloud. I have 2 4tb Toshiba HDDs that match closely with the dead hdd.

I want to try to recover data from it mainly because I want the experience... Let me explain. The drive clicks, yes you can hear the disks spin up to speed and then you hear clicking as it's trying to read.

I want to know if I can start off trying to swap the circuit board to rule that out without much issue? I have true HEPA filter air purifiers and I can rotate and angle them to have a positive pure air pressure if I need to open it up and swap out the arms.

Is it worth trying? Anything I should know or think about in my decision to try this?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah... That probably because either the drive thought it was falling and triggered the HDD falling mechanism (often found on 2.5" hdd) which would move the arms off the disks to prevent them from hitting it and damaging the platters to unrecoverable states.

Or if done on 3.5" without this feature built into it, could just damage the platters.

Would probably be less risky to open it up and unstick the arms yourself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn't work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing.. that never worked either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I once had a hard drive of some particular vintage that wasn't able to start. I did actually get it running with a hammer tap. Got the remains of data out and replaced the drive. It was nothing special, a Unix system drive with nothing that wasn't on tape, but I just had to see if I could fix a hard drive with a hammer.

I also remember one admin who would often be seen walking between computer maintenance room and workshop wing with drives and a blacksmiths hammer labelled "format".