Re: [MLUG] Hardisk Sound?

["Mark A. Haidekker" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Ok, now that this thread is going for some tine, I think I may add my own 
$0.02... At least I can claim some 8 to 10 salvages in my life, partly 
hopeless cases.

The first decision, even before the good points that Christian made, should be 
whether a professional service should salvage the data. Remember - whatever 
you do with the disk, you make it harder for the data recovery people. So, 
#1: Decide what data salvage is worth to you. If you decide you want to pay, 
DO NOT DO ANYTHING WITH THE DRIVE - just hand it over. Those guys have clean 
rooms, spare heads, spare disks etc and can do a *lot* more that you can do.

Ok, so if you want to try yourself, 

On Friday 02 July 2004 18:07, Christian M. Cepel wrote:

> Do not boot the drive into windows or whatever.     

Absolutely right. Windows writes a lot on boot-up already, and writing to a 
dying drive is always bad. The potential for a mess-up is great. Attach it to 
a Linux box. Don't boot from the drive. Mount manually. Mount read-only. 
Remember: Linux has 'dd'.

> Pick your priorities
> in order of which you most wish to recover and plan to start on that
> first...  

Yes. I agreee again.

> DO NOT try to recover the whole drive... You'll get NOTHING
> instead of 'something'.  

Not necessarily. If the drive reads wqith only a few i/o errors, use dd with 
the conv=noerror parameter. Provided, of course, that your "working" HDD 
holds the full capacity of the failing drive. I did that recently with a 3GB 
drive. Few read errors. Loop-mount the dd'd file, burn to CD. Done.

> Put it on a machine containing disk utilities,
> where you're sure it won't be mounted and spun up until the utilities
> look at it.  Use the utility to go down your list of priorities and get
> as far as you can before the drive dies.

Right. See above - if the drive is too large, proceed as Christian suggested.

And a word about stuck heads. I saved three drives (the data, actually) by 
opening the drive and cautiously working loose the heads. Once the drive 
spins up, close it, save the data and shut it down for good. Do this in a 
room as clean as possible. No A/C, no fans. Don't breathe (ideally, wear a 
green mask). The filter in the drive can deal with a few particles. And 
that's what will accumulate at most during 1-2 minutes of being open. Of 
course, you must avoid creating metal particles form the screws etc. 

I can't stress enough: If the data holds significant value, DON'T DO ANYTHING. 
Give it to a service.

Mark

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