A Little Tap'll Do Ya

Recently I was asked to try to save the data on a failed hard drive.  This was a fairly new 2 terabyte Western Digital "green" drive.  I was told the drive just "up and stopped" one day and the drive letter disappeared.  I've had the opportunity to retreive data on lots of drives before, and this, I thought, would be no different than the hundreds of others I had managed to get data from.

I hooked the drive up to my test machine and hit the power button.  The machine took a long time to initialize the drives, and then gave me a failure message from the one I had hooked up.  I felt the top and bottom of the hard drive and it didn't feel warm, nor did it feel like it was spinning the platters inside.

My first thought was that it was indeed 'hooped" and beyond my level of repair.  So I called my client and told him what I had discovered.  He said he was between backups on that drive and that there was some stuff on there that was very important.  I told him there were some data recovery companies in BC and we could ship his drive over to one of them but it was not a cheap process.  He wanted to know how much and I said it was at least several hundred dollars for sure.  I told him I could do some research for him and come up with some sort of plan.

I called around and talked to a few recovery companies on the mainland, and came up with the best deal I could find and that was about $750, and if no data could be recovered, then no charge.  But I also had to send a second drive for the data to be copied to and provide a list of the most important folders on the drive so they would at least have something to search for while the drive was running in some capacity.

After working out a deal and confirming with my customer how to proceed, I was getting ready to send in the two hard drives via Purolator.  But during a quick meeting with my engineer friend, I had an idea I would try.  He said it was possible that the platters were just "stuck" because they were in the middle of a read/write when something happened.  He suggested I try holding the drive parallel to the floor and quickly spin the drive back and forth with my hand.  The idea, of course, was to make the case spin faster than the platters, thereby breaking them free.  I tried that a few time but it didn't work.

Then I had another idea.  I was thinking of times when I have had worn brushes on a car starter and had to tap tap tap on the side of the starter to make it move just enough to move past the flat spot so I could start the car.  I took a little hammer and tap tap tapped on the edge of the hard drive in the same manner.  Then I hooked the drive up again to my test machine, and VOILA!  It spun up.

I was so excited.  I allowed my test machine to boot up and I was able to read the drive.  It needed to run a CHKDSK to correct a few small errors, but after that it was able to operate normally.  I called my client and told him the good news.  He was all smiles.  I told him of my new plan to copy his data to a spare drive I had and then to run a thorough diagnostic on his drive.  He agreed.

Well, it took awhile to do all that but overall the result was good.  My customer paid me for my time and expertise.  And it was lest costly than 'Plan A,' so he was pretty happy.  Me too.

So the next time a drive doesn't spin up for an unknown reason, you have something you can try before you send or throw it away.

Happy Computing!

Big Mike