Thanks for the video. I've had my share of hard drives I had to recover for clients. Nothing as professional as replacing the heads but I know what a pain it can be to have a barely holding on for dear life drive and recovering sectors, skipping sectors to try to get it to read in a different way. Just great job on this video. I always told my customers to spend the cash and have it done professionally. It's worth it and leaps and bounds better chance for successful recovery then just me possibly doing further damage by pushing it further and further into unrecoverable state.
I have swapped controller boards on a 250 GB SATA Maxtor that had something metal fall on it while powered up and exploded the controller board, and it did work (with a bit of strange behavior). It was from the same model, but completely different serial number, and manufactured like a year later, and the donor drive had mechanical faults and would not calibrate. When I powered it up the first time, it made some strange noises and took a few attempts to calibrate, but did start working and has continued to work fine since. And that was about 5 years ago (though I don't use it often anymore). The only strange behavior was that I had one particular computer where it would cause the BIOS to hang while detecting the drive if connected while booting, but hotplugging it worked fine. There was nothing critical on this drive, so it wasn't worth paying to have it recovered, it just saved time and I wanted to have a working drive. The moral of the story is, despite what he said, if your data is not critical and you aren't going to send it to be recovered, I'd say it is worth it to try a board swap, if you happen to have one available.
Nice Recovery......I had 2 drives crashed on me on a raid 5 and I didn't have a backup. I lost my data. I learned my lesson, Now I save all my data on my Google Drive ...and now I never have to worrying about a drive failing and losing my data. Cloud Storage is the answer.
Very much appreciate the video presentation. I know data recovery can be time consuming, expensive with no guarantee. It's why I do my best to advise my customers the importance of backups.
External 3.5" drives are designed to be stationary and I'd never trust a single external drive as a primary storage medium. They are great for running your backups to and for temporary storage of large files and directories, but never for primary storage.
This is really interesting and appreciate your professionalism. I've moved away from storing any data that is critical on single drives and moved to Raid 6/10 or ZFS, with additional data backup policies. I treat my hard drives with the expectation that they will fail eventually. For the price of recovery, you can just buy a new drive or two.
I used to do PC repair and one of the worst situations I ran across was a music producer who had about 2 months of audio data on an HDD that went bad and we had to refer him to a data recovery service (though I can't remember if we had specific ones to recommend if they chose that route).
I believe I have the same exact issue. my drive just fell Thur. I'm devastated because my computer crashed and they retrieved and backed up everything on this drive. 2 days after receiving my computer back I had this happen. definitely learned my lesson. Everyone please please backup on multiple sources....about how much does this run? a company in my area has already said to only give it to someone with a clean room.
That's why I put $900 to $1,500+. It depends on the size of the drive, what exactly happened and the extent of the damage. When a drive drops, it can have a wide range of issues, from just a damaged set of heads, to the heads seized to the platters, to the entire spindle being seized.
amazing video! congrats on the recovery. I try not to hate on a single company but every drive I have that is in a non-working or barely-working state is a seagate. I just bought a new drive for my server, and decided to go with WD.
And this, people, is why you have multiple backups of your important files. I have three different backups and the most important stuff is stored in a paid cloud service. It's cheaper to have 3 or 4 external drives than to have a drive recovered - by a LONG shot! I bet this Scott guy ended up paying in the thousands of dollars for this service.
If it is some small file that is really important, you can obviously back it up using a free service. But large files are impossible to upload. Maybe, if you compress them. But uploading a lot(like 10gb) is going to take weeks.
Oh gosh I hope the people here in Germany are just as good as you are. I have all of my customers' pictures on there (I'm a photographer) and I'd be screwed if they can't recover my data. I'm so worried.
@ACS Data Recovery, Hey guys, in the future before you attempt a head swap double check that the "Pre-Amps" are the same/very similar. To do that connect to Seagate drive through Serial TTL (this one is 1.8V beware to get logic converter! There is schematic for Kindle on the web). Then once in connected to the drive click "ctrl+Z" to get into service mode. Then click "ctrl+l" (its l and not i) to get HDD info, which will show the "Pre-amp" model. Then just compare numbers between patient and donor drives. But in this case I guess you didn't want to power it up at all to avoid further damage. You could cover the motor contacts to prevent the drive from spinning - then it shouldn't try to move the heads. Great job anyway!
That is something we've been doing for a while now, but we weren't doing it when this video was produced. You are right, it is an excellent way to avoid head compatibility issues. Thanks for the awesome contribution!!
I find this all fascinating...very geeky. All I have are Seagate drives lol. Never had a problem in fact I have a drive that I bought in 06. I guess I've been very lucky.
Very interesting and educational. But whenever I am disassembling anything I have compartmentalized trays for every part - screws, nuts, connectors, you name it. Just dropping screws on the workbench is begging for a visit from Mr. Murphy! Cheers
Very informative video. Question: When replacing the motor and chassis from a donor drive but keeping transplanting the original PCB board and platters, can the armature and head assembly from the donor drive be used? Or would that need to be transplanted as well from the original drive? I suspect the original is not required, but just curious.
If the donor heads are good -it is best to keep them. Alignment of new heads can be tricky as the screw hole is larger than the screw that keeps the heads in place. If you have a PC-3000 you can read the micro-jog from the pre-amp on the head assembly to see if they match.
I dropped a WD external drive as it was being written to via a disk refresh program I was trialing. No surprise that it stopped working. Tried it briefly later on (against good advice) and it worked for a short while although a bit slow. Stopped again when warmed up, so with nothing to lose (all the data on the NAS anyway) I put it in the fridge for an hour or two and it worked like normal while really chilled, not sure why this was so but thought it interesting observation.
I always handled hard drives with so much care, but now i think I will with even more. They are such amazing and complex devices that need all that care. When i see someone carelessly putting their laptop on a desk and hear it hitting the desk i cringe so much
Fantastic video. I suppose this skill will be a thing of the past in the next few years now that SSD technology is becoming more affordable and reliable. I have just installed 2 Samsung EVO's, one in my laptop and one in my gaming pc and I won't buy another mechanical drive in the future, the performance difference is astonishing.
I wanted to commend you all on a great instructional video as to what goes into data recovery. Your methods seem pure and your intentions and resulting costs are true to your trade and expertise. I wanted to ask when shipping a drive through standard services whether it be in for recovery or just normal day-in/day-out transport, what steps for protection do you recommend? When it comes to storing a hard drive archive (digital picture images) do you recommend any special care such as spinning up the hardware quarterly of semi-annually? Do you recommend one drive over another for quality and serviceability in data recovery or are they all about the same? Thanks for the great video!
Thank you. To protect the drive during shipping, we recommend wrapping it in 4 or 5 layers of bubble wrap and putting it in a well fitting box so it doesn't bounce around. I'd store a drive the same way, and maybe test it out once or twice a year. Hitachi's seem to have the best track record of the newer drives. Thanks again for the kind words.
This is fascinating to watch and very informative, but just a tip for future videos, please mount your camera in such a way that your drive work fills the frame, probably from above would be best, and at a slight angle inward - That would provide far better detail, we really don't need to see the technician's body in 80% of the picture, it adds nothing to the content.
Reminds me I have an "old" WD 200GB (the first 200GB to market IIRC) with a defect, the usual clicking locked head. I guess it's a controler bug .. I wonder how easy it is to fix or swap.
Hi. I suspect that I dropped my hard drive after attempting to plug it in many times receiving the same message of the hard drive not being recognized. I tried data recovery software, tried checking device manager, even tried to go to my local computer repair service that's a mile away from home (he didn't open the hard drive at all), etc. When plugged in, I don't hear any clicking noises or any similar noises like that. I haven't opened the hard drive yet due to fear of dust ruining it. I'm currently in Florida. Am I pretty much fucked? Also, how long does it take on average and what is the highest cost you charged for data recovery?
These hard drives are a pain, because I bought a few 5 TB drives to store my photos and one for my docs, but once you start adding more and more data, they stop working. It's as if we are going back to the days of record paying LP's/vinyls except, in a "miniature" form. How much do you charge for data recovery? thanks.
Data recovery costs vary greatly depending on the size of the hard drive and the type of failure that has occurred. You can visit our website at acsdata.com or give us a call to get more information.
How much did this specific case cost if you can reveal that information? I suspect this is a similar situation with my 500 GB external drive I bought in college that my dad knocked onto the floor about the same distance only a week after I bought it and it was making a klacking noise like the head was slamming into something so I immediately powered it off. I ended up getting another of the same model the next day so I do have a working drive that would quite likely work as a parts drive. I can't get any of the specific make or model numbers right now since they are both hidden away in a storage room at the moment.
I accidentally started a storage space process on my HD. it formatted my drive. when I use recovery software to retrieve the files the files aren't useable. is the drive totally screwed or can it be recovered completely to the point the files work again?
Thanks for a really interesting video. I noticed that a few times you mentioned about trying a different set of heads. Is that because the heads are from a donor drive, and you don't know what condition they are in? Also, could you not buy the heads unused from a manufacturer? finally, are the files recovered using the original name or are they just recovered as File 1, File 2, File 3 etc... Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I'm not really familiar with this stuff.
It's not uncommon for us to go through multiple sets of heads. There could be damage to the platter surface from the initial head failure that causes subsequent heads to fail. Also, there can be slight variances between heads and you may have one set that is functional, but not very efficient, so trying another set of heads is sometimes worth it. The manufacturers don't sell the heads. It's better anyway to get head sets that were manufactured around the same time as the failed ones. As far as the file structure, that is almost always like it was originally...same folder names, same file names.
doesn't the phones speaker magnet interfere with the disk platter when you are tacking the photo? how sensitive are the disk? can a fridge magnet scramble the data ? pls reply
I just finished building a DIY 'clean room' cabinet to open up my 2.0TB WD20EARX hard drive that just stopped reading. I'm hoping the head just needs to be reparked. I'm 'going in' tomorrow... wish me luck.
Very impressive! I enjoy working with both hardware and software on my computers very much and this is one of very few things i would never try at home. Manually editing file systems with a hex editor and dd - yes! Opening the drives and work with the internals - no! Like I said, very impressive!
DD is such a life saver. I once had to dd a drive that wouldn't boot to a file, mount the file, run diagnostics and repair, then rewrite the file to the drive. Thank goodness that particular OS kept it's own boot sector backup :D
Thanks for the vid, it's great. Just wondering 1. What do you do with drives that have FDE like FileVault or Bitlocker? Are they unreadable unless you can image the whole thing? (And have the password/RK of course) and 2. Do you get many failed SSDs coming through and how successful is the recovery process?
As long as we have a complete image and the password/key we can recover any type of encrypted drive. We get quite a few failed SSD's, and they are much more expensive to recover. As long as the chips aren't fried, the data should be recoverable on them.
we got a hp pc at work right now I had to replace the hdd in it the original was a 2tb Seagate dm family drive that has 7000 bad sectors according to the Linux live cd we used to see if it's accessible. I'm trying to clone it to the new drive but it's looking grim
This is actually really interesting to me and I'm learning what I can, even though I don't think these are intended for instructional purposes. However, how would someone go about learning and mastering how to do this correctly? Is there schooling? Or is there some sort of internship one can do? Hope to hear back!
Hi, I have the same series of hard drive of that video, but it is actually the 2 TB model, I had it for around 5 years and everything OK. I moved recently to an electrically unstable zone, and power outages are frequent. Along with my OS, I have HDD Sentinel which showed 100% health and performance besides the random outages when the computer was on, but yesterday after an outage, the health dropped to 31%, and it says they were 8 reallocated sectors out of nowhere, should I concern about the "142 days" of lifetime remaining? I have no important data, but is the drive I need to have my computer running good, I have some spare SATA2 HDD, but runs very slow and I cant buy another. Thanks in advance and good job
Same thing with Seagate BUP Slim 2TB. Still works, I reformatted this one from GPT to MBR to work on legacy hardware unlike the 4TB WD40EZRZ. The 2TB Seagate works with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11, Server, Embedded. Anything NT-based since Windows 2000. The 4TB WD40EZRZ on the other hand requires Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and later for 64-bit OS, otherwise Windows Vista if using on a 32-bit OS (like a cutie 10.1" netbook). I've dropped the Seagate, thrown it, stepped on it, bit it, still works, no impact on my teeth either when biting in the bite test. I'm a human ToughBook. I identify as a ToughBook.
hi my hard drive sounds it running ok but wont play on my sony smart tv it keeps asking me to register but i done this already before i started recording from the smart tv can anyone help me out please thanks very much.
Thanks for great video, was very interested on how a head swap procedure goes. Any chance you can share the name of the software you all use or is it some inhouse solution or NDA type agreement?
I'd love to see some more about your work environment. Do you have just the flow hood? How do you manage the rest of your work space's clean requirements?
The rest of our facility is just rows of imaging stations. A flow hood is all that is needed for working on hard drives. You just want to minimize the potential for dust and debris to fall onto the platter.
Just as I'm trying to archive stuff to Blu-ray discs right now, I have a question: So how much would a recovery by you that goes *exactly* like this one cost? (I'm not trying to say that there will be another one exactly like this, but telling me that would give me an idea of how much my bank account would need to worry if I ever needed this level of service.)
My heads and platter have no visible damage, the platters would not spin until I reset the head, now the platter spins no problem, but the head will not move. What would be the next diagnosis? *note: Platter was checked and spins smoothly with no apparent off balance, wobble, or off center motion of any kind. Disk diagnostic tool can read or re-format/ write to disk.
So what happens with the heads that were replaced? Do you put them back in the donor drive or throw them away (Since they are super sensitive)? Thanks!
Wow! Thanks for the super fast reply! Also, lets say I misaligned a plate, is it possible to realign it? I know its near impossible but are there any paid services/applications that allows a person to do such thing? Thanks :)
if the platters get misaligned even at microscopic level, the recovery becomes impossible because it is at such a minute level even recovery companies cannot get that back. This is done when the drive is manufactured at the plant.
when you drop the drive and it stops responding (if it responds the discs stay good) the discs have a limited life when spinning if you keep using them. The replacement heads are reusable for some time. The damaged drive stays damaged
Sorry for my English, it's not the native one and do not have subtitles in the video. . . Please inform which software is used from the 22:00 minute and what is its function? Thanks!
3 of mine died within a week from eachother, before I had my replacement drives in place. Backblaze's "Hard disk reliability test" for 2015 shows Seagate ST3000DM001 winning the "worst disk by far"-award with a VERY good margin.
my ST3000DM003 died without any warning. Was listening to music on it and after it finished the song i heard three loud clicks and it was done. When i power it up it spins, makes three clicks and stops spinning. I will replace the head as soon as i can afford a donor drive if i can get my hands on one.
You can see a vertical wobble in the dark shadow when you rotate the platters at 15:00... (dark shadow of the plate at the top left, hanging over the top platter). This a warped platter?
Hi, found this very interesting. but also left my head in partition one way or another. how is it possible one pair of heads work better then the others.. arent they meant to perform exactly the same since they were manufactured in mass-production? i mean i really cant understand the difference in reliability. from the one set of heads to another assuming the head replacements were new/intact. could you enlighten me please? :) anyway thanks for the vid. greets
+Laurens Burssens Usually if we go through multiple sets of heads during a recovery it's because the platter is damaged and is impacting the heads while they are being used. Eventually it causes them to fail and we have to install another set of heads. On other recoveries, some heads just seem to work better than others. Typically we find that the close we get to the original manufacturing date, the better. This is due to slight...almost minuscule variations in the way they are produced.
+acsdata oh... So there actually might be a noticeable difference in performance when the donor and original heads didn't come from the same batch. The reason why I watched this was actually because I had a kind of working drive. It was the same model. Everything seemed working right and didn't make disturbing noises. Just a little tiny and funny sound in the beginning when start reading the I'm guessing MBR. But that was all. And it seemed like it was stuck in read mode. When connecting to an external Sata controller it showed up in Windows. But eventually disappeared. I figured there must have been a tiny issue with the heads. I even opened up the drive and took a quick peek. Didn't see anything out of the usual. I also messed up eventually by touching the platters. Luckily there wasn't any data on them. But yeah I was wonder if a head replacement could have fixed the drive. PS: Thanks for the reply.
You did an absolute great job of recovering the data but the worst scenario what could happen is if those platters are broken in pieces, in this case you have to puzzle those pieces together and then put them under an microscope, while extracting it,then align that data to other parts of the data were it belonges to, then use error correction to correct corrupted data , to recover and correct data as much as possible, then make backups of it on ssd and hdd drives to make sure it’s (tempuratury) save, But such process is extreamly difficuilt, time consumming and very $1000 expensive, but it’s worth it if you cannot life without that data.
I have a hard drive that contains valuable photos and it got physically damaged. It has two surfaces of the 6 surfaces of the platters damaged. I send it to a recovery data company and they failed to retrieve anything saying that they can't read surfaces separately and that each single photo is divided along the 6 surfaces. I am surprised that they did not tell me this piece of information at the diagnostics before wr proceed with the data recovery. Is what they are saying correct. A photo of around 50Mb will have to be divided on several surfaces not just one, since its a small file ?
Yes, what they are saying is correct. Each head reads an individual platter surface. If there are 6 heads, there are 3 platters total. You can generate a head map and read each platter surface individually, or deactivate a single head that is having a difficult time reading due to platter damage. However, the files themselves, will be striped across each surface, since the heads typically read a hundred thousand or so sectors on average, before switching to the next head. The type of head map depends on the drive. Some will read from the platter surfaces sequentially, and that helps get pretty good chunks of data, even if one head is completely unreadable. For example in most Seagate drives, the head mapping would be something like 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. etc. etc. So if head 2 couldn't be read, you would still have large chunks of data that would still be ok...but even then...if it's a 50MB file, it's still going to be fragmented to some extent.
Thank you so much for your response. So, does this mean that as long as the file/photo is 50 MB it can not be retrieved at all since it has been fragment and definitely one fragment lies in the damaged unreadable surface?
do not put it on from now on. TRY - currys / dixons do this service for you in the UK England ) its going to cost you in the 100's and upto 1000 pounds. if the whole drive is restored. the cost depends on how much data is recovered and time spent. If its just a few photo's it will cost I think about 200 or 300 pounds. Try Dixon's / Currys. They are the same company
Great video, my friend dropped her external WD hard drive. It reads and mounts in Linux but data transfer is very slow, about 1hr for a 1GB file. Have you seen this before? If so, do you have any recommendations?
Most likely one head is damaged and severely degraded. What happens is, the heads that read the servo tracks are ok and the drive calibrates. Sometimes, depending on which head it is, you can still mount the drive and see the data because the bitmap can also be read. But when transferring data, when it needs to read from the platter surface with the damaged head, the drive will almost come to a standstill. If that is the case it would need the heads replaced to be able to read all platter surfaces.
Most likely one head is damaged and severely degraded. What happens is, the heads that read the servo tracks are ok and the drive calibrates. Sometimes, depending on which head it is, you can still mount the drive and see the data because the bitmap can also be read. But when transferring data, when it needs to read from the platter surface with the damaged head, the drive will almost come to a standstill. If that is the case it would need the heads replaced to be able to read all platter surfaces.
How could different sets of head not work? I mean they are all built the same or is it that there are minute micron differences that make the alignment or the patterns or such different so one head assembly would work and another not or is it something else involved?
Sometimes the rubber seal around the edge sticks pretty good and you just have to gently keep working around the perimeter of the drive until it works it's way loose.
I hope I never have to use your services, but you're probably the first company I'll call if it comes to that. Great video, and great job!
Thanks for watching!
It is always a privilege to watch a master at work, regardless of the profession.
the guy recovering: * heavy sweating *
Thanks for the video. I've had my share of hard drives I had to recover for clients. Nothing as professional as replacing the heads but I know what a pain it can be to have a barely holding on for dear life drive and recovering sectors, skipping sectors to try to get it to read in a different way.
Just great job on this video. I always told my customers to spend the cash and have it done professionally. It's worth it and leaps and bounds better chance for successful recovery then just me possibly doing further damage by pushing it further and further into unrecoverable state.
I have swapped controller boards on a 250 GB SATA Maxtor that had something metal fall on it while powered up and exploded the controller board, and it did work (with a bit of strange behavior). It was from the same model, but completely different serial number, and manufactured like a year later, and the donor drive had mechanical faults and would not calibrate. When I powered it up the first time, it made some strange noises and took a few attempts to calibrate, but did start working and has continued to work fine since. And that was about 5 years ago (though I don't use it often anymore). The only strange behavior was that I had one particular computer where it would cause the BIOS to hang while detecting the drive if connected while booting, but hotplugging it worked fine.
There was nothing critical on this drive, so it wasn't worth paying to have it recovered, it just saved time and I wanted to have a working drive.
The moral of the story is, despite what he said, if your data is not critical and you aren't going to send it to be recovered, I'd say it is worth it to try a board swap, if you happen to have one available.
Almost midnight in the mid of a work week, and I watched close to 40min video on HDD data recovery :)
I could just listen. Work of a professional. Like music to my ears.
great video! I should send this to all my clients who think I can snap my fingers and magically make their dead drives work
you are just a noob who doesnt even know what hes doing. thats why reliable professionals like Ontrack exist lol
Nice Recovery......I had 2 drives crashed on me on a raid 5 and I didn't have a backup. I lost my data. I learned my lesson, Now I save all my data on my Google Drive ...and now I never have to worrying about a drive failing and losing my data. Cloud Storage is the answer.
This was both very interesting and relaxing to watch.
Very much appreciate the video presentation.
I know data recovery can be time consuming, expensive with no guarantee.
It's why I do my best to advise my customers the importance of backups.
I like how measured his movements are. i love looking at this
The irony when "My Documents Backup" is on a drive that needed to be recovered
Awesome video and congrats on the successful recovery!!
+Michael Riston (Mike) Thanks!
same here, i like to ask you a question ACS Data Recovery.
Michael Riston btw your name is familiar to Michael Rosen if you know who that is
Nice to see it was someone willing to recover their family photos and memories, and not some scumbag's plot to destroy the world. Great job.
Thanks for sharing - you have amazing patience!
Thank you.
YA ITS WAS AMAZING TO MATCH THo...
so Seagates are more likely to have problems than WD Drives?
3 am . Los Angeles.. simply a good expending time viewing this video. thanks
60k photos on a Seagate dude rolled the dice for sure
lol
Welp. 50.000 photos on an external seagate drive. That's a disaster waiting to happen
1 photo on a seagate drive is a disaster waiting to happen :)
i see, you like seagate? ;)
They've caused me a lot of sleepless nights crying. And no, I'm not a girl ;)
toysareforboys Ohhh I remember you from the fan acoustic test lol
External 3.5" drives are designed to be stationary and I'd never trust a single external drive as a primary storage medium. They are great for running your backups to and for temporary storage of large files and directories, but never for primary storage.
This is really interesting and appreciate your professionalism. I've moved away from storing any data that is critical on single drives and moved to Raid 6/10 or ZFS, with additional data backup policies. I treat my hard drives with the expectation that they will fail eventually. For the price of recovery, you can just buy a new drive or two.
Good job, nice presentation of the data recovery process.
All that technical details... looks like each data recovery is a case study.
Probably explains the price of those services I guess....
I used to do PC repair and one of the worst situations I ran across was a music producer who had about 2 months of audio data on an HDD that went bad and we had to refer him to a data recovery service (though I can't remember if we had specific ones to recommend if they chose that route).
Fascinating, thanks for sharing!
very cool videos. Keep it up!
I believe I have the same exact issue. my drive just fell Thur. I'm devastated because my computer crashed and they retrieved and backed up everything on this drive. 2 days after receiving my computer back I had this happen. definitely learned my lesson. Everyone please please backup on multiple sources....about how much does this run? a company in my area has already said to only give it to someone with a clean room.
Depends on the size of the drive, but it can range from $900 up to $1,500+ depending on the extent of the damage.
another tech of yours quotes 1600-1700
That's why I put $900 to $1,500+. It depends on the size of the drive, what exactly happened and the extent of the damage. When a drive drops, it can have a wide range of issues, from just a damaged set of heads, to the heads seized to the platters, to the entire spindle being seized.
+ACS Data Recovery gotcha! I was just tryna get an idea for my gofundme. thanks
To be honest, that's less than I thought it'd be. If this doesn't teach you to back your things up, I don't know what does. :)
amazing video! congrats on the recovery. I try not to hate on a single company but every drive I have that is in a non-working or barely-working state is a seagate. I just bought a new drive for my server, and decided to go with WD.
Strangely relaxing ..
That's because it's boring. I watched it on 2x speed though.
you need to be very relaxed to do this )
And this, people, is why you have multiple backups of your important files. I have three different backups and the most important stuff is stored in a paid cloud service. It's cheaper to have 3 or 4 external drives than to have a drive recovered - by a LONG shot! I bet this Scott guy ended up paying in the thousands of dollars for this service.
:/ If you have bad internet, it will take years to back it up.
Windows updates disallow not rebooting your computer every single day.
If it is some small file that is really important, you can obviously back it up using a free service.
But large files are impossible to upload.
Maybe, if you compress them.
But uploading a lot(like 10gb) is going to take weeks.
I bet you he doesn't like your comment
Mans gotta make money
Cloud services can disappear overnight or glitch out you know.
Oh gosh I hope the people here in Germany are just as good as you are. I have all of my customers' pictures on there (I'm a photographer) and I'd be screwed if they can't recover my data. I'm so worried.
Thank you so much for watching.
@ACS Data Recovery,
Hey guys, in the future before you attempt a head swap double check that the "Pre-Amps" are the same/very similar.
To do that connect to Seagate drive through Serial TTL (this one is 1.8V beware to get logic converter! There is schematic for Kindle on the web). Then once in connected to the drive click "ctrl+Z" to get into service mode. Then click "ctrl+l" (its l and not i) to get HDD info, which will show the "Pre-amp" model.
Then just compare numbers between patient and donor drives.
But in this case I guess you didn't want to power it up at all to avoid further damage. You could cover the motor contacts to prevent the drive from spinning - then it shouldn't try to move the heads.
Great job anyway!
That is something we've been doing for a while now, but we weren't doing it when this video was produced. You are right, it is an excellent way to avoid head compatibility issues. Thanks for the awesome contribution!!
"He who laughs last must have made a backup!" ;)
About 15 years ago I had a Maxtor internal drive that was burning inside the computer.
Cool video. Thanks for posting. It amazes me that people still don't back up their data.
But, hey. Their stupidity is your job security!
What size of torx driver do you use for unscrew? T5 ? I am looking for one for PCB torx parts. thank you!
Thanks for your video, it was really help. i have a question what is the name of the tool to remove the screws for the hard drive. thx
Thank you. It's called a Torx driver.
do not power it off? of Corse the customer already tried powering the drive many times before they gave it to you
I find this all fascinating...very geeky. All I have are Seagate drives lol. Never had a problem in fact I have a drive that I bought in 06. I guess I've been very lucky.
Try to do a S.M.A.R.T. test on this drive... you'll see how lucky you are.
Very interesting and educational. But whenever I am disassembling anything I have compartmentalized trays for every part - screws, nuts, connectors, you name it. Just dropping screws on the workbench is begging for a visit from Mr. Murphy! Cheers
Very informative video. Question: When replacing the motor and chassis from a donor drive but keeping transplanting the original PCB board and platters, can the armature and head assembly from the donor drive be used? Or would that need to be transplanted as well from the original drive? I suspect the original is not required, but just curious.
If the donor heads are good -it is best to keep them. Alignment of new heads can be tricky as the screw hole is larger than the screw that keeps the heads in place. If you have a PC-3000 you can read the micro-jog from the pre-amp on the head assembly to see if they match.
Great video! Gonna try and do one of these myself. I know, it's harder than it looks, but only one way to learn.
Exactly.
I dropped a WD external drive as it was being written to via a disk refresh program I was trialing. No surprise that it stopped working. Tried it briefly later on (against good advice) and it worked for a short while although a bit slow. Stopped again when warmed up, so with nothing to lose (all the data on the NAS anyway) I put it in the fridge for an hour or two and it worked like normal while really chilled, not sure why this was so but thought it interesting observation.
I always handled hard drives with so much care, but now i think I will with even more. They are such amazing and complex devices that need all that care. When i see someone carelessly putting their laptop on a desk and hear it hitting the desk i cringe so much
Those must have been some seriously dank memes.
I'm curious what software you were using? The dialog boxes are DOS 5/6 era MFC controls.
10:41 "scratching our heads" - out of a DR specialist's mouth, that sounds almost like a double entendre.
Haha, nice pun!
Fantastic video. I suppose this skill will be a thing of the past in the next few years now that SSD technology is becoming more affordable and reliable. I have just installed 2 Samsung EVO's, one in my laptop and one in my gaming pc and I won't buy another mechanical drive in the future, the performance difference is astonishing.
I wanted to commend you all on a great instructional video as to what goes into data recovery. Your methods seem pure and your intentions and resulting costs are true to your trade and expertise. I wanted to ask when shipping a drive through standard services whether it be in for recovery or just normal day-in/day-out transport, what steps for protection do you recommend? When it comes to storing a hard drive archive (digital picture images) do you recommend any special care such as spinning up the hardware quarterly of semi-annually? Do you recommend one drive over another for quality and serviceability in data recovery or are they all about the same? Thanks for the great video!
Thank you. To protect the drive during shipping, we recommend wrapping it in 4 or 5 layers of bubble wrap and putting it in a well fitting box so it doesn't bounce around. I'd store a drive the same way, and maybe test it out once or twice a year. Hitachi's seem to have the best track record of the newer drives. Thanks again for the kind words.
My seagate 1 tb not detecting by pc and in disk management it shows Unallocated data and not initialise......How to recover that dta?
This is fascinating to watch and very informative, but just a tip for future videos, please mount your camera in such a way that your drive work fills the frame, probably from above would be best, and at a slight angle inward - That would provide far better detail, we really don't need to see the technician's body in 80% of the picture, it adds nothing to the content.
Reminds me I have an "old" WD 200GB (the first 200GB to market IIRC) with a defect, the usual clicking locked head. I guess it's a controler bug .. I wonder how easy it is to fix or swap.
I wonder if it'd be possible to reconstruct some of the files from the hexadecimal values shown when you were trying to build the bit map...
Hi. I suspect that I dropped my hard drive after attempting to plug it in many times receiving the same message of the hard drive not being recognized. I tried data recovery software, tried checking device manager, even tried to go to my local computer repair service that's a mile away from home (he didn't open the hard drive at all), etc. When plugged in, I don't hear any clicking noises or any similar noises like that. I haven't opened the hard drive yet due to fear of dust ruining it. I'm currently in Florida. Am I pretty much fucked? Also, how long does it take on average and what is the highest cost you charged for data recovery?
These hard drives are a pain, because I bought a few 5 TB drives to store my photos and one for my docs, but once you start adding more and more data, they stop working. It's as if we are going back to the days of record paying LP's/vinyls except, in a "miniature" form. How much do you charge for data recovery? thanks.
Data recovery costs vary greatly depending on the size of the hard drive and the type of failure that has occurred. You can visit our website at acsdata.com or give us a call to get more information.
How much did this specific case cost if you can reveal that information?
I suspect this is a similar situation with my 500 GB external drive I bought in college that my dad knocked onto the floor about the same distance only a week after I bought it and it was making a klacking noise like the head was slamming into something so I immediately powered it off. I ended up getting another of the same model the next day so I do have a working drive that would quite likely work as a parts drive. I can't get any of the specific make or model numbers right now since they are both hidden away in a storage room at the moment.
I accidentally started a storage space process on my HD. it formatted my drive. when I use recovery software to retrieve the files the files aren't useable. is the drive totally screwed or can it be recovered completely to the point the files work again?
Thanks for a really interesting video.
I noticed that a few times you mentioned about trying a different set of heads. Is that because the heads are from a donor drive, and you don't know what condition they are in? Also, could you not buy the heads unused from a manufacturer?
finally, are the files recovered using the original name or are they just recovered as File 1, File 2, File 3 etc...
Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I'm not really familiar with this stuff.
It's not uncommon for us to go through multiple sets of heads. There could be damage to the platter surface from the initial head failure that causes subsequent heads to fail. Also, there can be slight variances between heads and you may have one set that is functional, but not very efficient, so trying another set of heads is sometimes worth it. The manufacturers don't sell the heads. It's better anyway to get head sets that were manufactured around the same time as the failed ones. As far as the file structure, that is almost always like it was originally...same folder names, same file names.
Thank you.
Much appreciated.
doesn't the phones speaker magnet interfere with the disk platter when you are tacking the photo?
how sensitive are the disk? can a fridge magnet scramble the data ?
pls reply
mine both hdd opening wont. both inside xp have. recent 4 year since open cant im.
I just finished building a DIY 'clean room' cabinet to open up my 2.0TB WD20EARX hard drive that just stopped reading. I'm hoping the head just needs to be reparked. I'm 'going in' tomorrow... wish me luck.
Whats is the problem with seagate hard drives. Ive have problems with 2 of this disk with fatal results
Very impressive! I enjoy working with both hardware and software on my computers very much and this is one of very few things i would never try at home. Manually editing file systems with a hex editor and dd - yes! Opening the drives and work with the internals - no!
Like I said, very impressive!
DD is such a life saver. I once had to dd a drive that wouldn't boot to a file, mount the file, run diagnostics and repair, then rewrite the file to the drive. Thank goodness that particular OS kept it's own boot sector backup :D
Thanks for the vid, it's great. Just wondering 1. What do you do with drives that have FDE like FileVault or Bitlocker? Are they unreadable unless you can image the whole thing? (And have the password/RK of course) and 2. Do you get many failed SSDs coming through and how successful is the recovery process?
As long as we have a complete image and the password/key we can recover any type of encrypted drive. We get quite a few failed SSD's, and they are much more expensive to recover. As long as the chips aren't fried, the data should be recoverable on them.
we got a hp pc at work right now I had to replace the hdd in it the original was a 2tb Seagate dm family drive that has 7000 bad sectors according to the Linux live cd we used to see if it's accessible. I'm trying to clone it to the new drive but it's looking grim
I can send my IDE Samsung 40gb for you guys to recover some tibia pictures?
That is why every Sysadmins mantra should be backup once, twice, thrice!
Even more so with SSD once they go poof it is game over!
Couldn't agree more.
This is actually really interesting to me and I'm learning what I can, even though I don't think these are intended for instructional purposes. However, how would someone go about learning and mastering how to do this correctly? Is there schooling? Or is there some sort of internship one can do? Hope to hear back!
Hi, I have the same series of hard drive of that video, but it is actually the 2 TB model, I had it for around 5 years and everything OK. I moved recently to an electrically unstable zone, and power outages are frequent. Along with my OS, I have HDD Sentinel which showed 100% health and performance besides the random outages when the computer was on, but yesterday after an outage, the health dropped to 31%, and it says they were 8 reallocated sectors out of nowhere, should I concern about the "142 days" of lifetime remaining? I have no important data, but is the drive I need to have my computer running good, I have some spare SATA2 HDD, but runs very slow and I cant buy another. Thanks in advance and good job
I've dropped my external 4TB hard drive several times, it still works.
Isaac Wright What brand do you have?
I have dropped few over the years never had any issues. Last night that all changes, just bumped it, it fell about 12 inches.. doesn't work :(
@@mdyiya WDC WD40EZRZ
Same thing with Seagate BUP Slim 2TB. Still works, I reformatted this one from GPT to MBR to work on legacy hardware unlike the 4TB WD40EZRZ. The 2TB Seagate works with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10, 11, Server, Embedded. Anything NT-based since Windows 2000. The 4TB WD40EZRZ on the other hand requires Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and later for 64-bit OS, otherwise Windows Vista if using on a 32-bit OS (like a cutie 10.1" netbook). I've dropped the Seagate, thrown it, stepped on it, bit it, still works, no impact on my teeth either when biting in the bite test.
I'm a human ToughBook. I identify as a ToughBook.
hi my hard drive sounds it running ok but wont play on my sony smart tv it keeps asking me to register but i done this already before i started recording from the smart tv can anyone help me out please thanks very much.
Thanks for great video, was very interested on how a head swap procedure goes. Any chance you can share the name of the software you all use or is it some inhouse solution or NDA type agreement?
Deepspar Disk Imager
what happen if i already open the hard drive case by myself?is it still can recovery or not?
I'd love to see some more about your work environment. Do you have just the flow hood? How do you manage the rest of your work space's clean requirements?
The rest of our facility is just rows of imaging stations. A flow hood is all that is needed for working on hard drives. You just want to minimize the potential for dust and debris to fall onto the platter.
Just as I'm trying to archive stuff to Blu-ray discs right now, I have a question: So how much would a recovery by you that goes *exactly* like this one cost?
(I'm not trying to say that there will be another one exactly like this, but telling me that would give me an idea of how much my bank account would need to worry if I ever needed this level of service.)
thank you ! i want to kone the name of recovery tools ? can you tell me,thanks !
Deepspar Disk Imager
My heads and platter have no visible damage, the platters would not spin until I reset the head, now the platter spins no problem, but the head will not move. What would be the next diagnosis? *note: Platter was checked and spins smoothly with no apparent off balance, wobble, or off center motion of any kind. Disk diagnostic tool can read or re-format/ write to disk.
Is it possible to recover data from a wd HDD that stopped working and is making beeping noise after a power outage?
So what happens with the heads that were replaced? Do you put them back in the donor drive or throw them away (Since they are super sensitive)?
Thanks!
We will generally replace them back into the parts drive. It's not unusual for us to use a donor set of heads multiple times on different recoveries.
Wow! Thanks for the super fast reply!
Also, lets say I misaligned a plate, is it possible to realign it? I know its near impossible but are there any paid services/applications that allows a person to do such thing?
Thanks :)
if the platters get misaligned even at microscopic level, the recovery becomes impossible because it is at such a minute level even recovery companies cannot get that back. This is done when the drive is manufactured at the plant.
Simon de Almeida ù
when you drop the drive and it stops responding (if it responds the discs stay good) the discs have a limited life when spinning if you keep using them. The replacement heads are reusable for some time. The damaged drive stays damaged
Which software are you used for hdd health checkup in this video?
Sorry for my English, it's not the native one and do not have subtitles in the video. . .
Please inform which software is used from the 22:00 minute and what is its function?
Thanks!
What are recovery costs in relation to a new drive? Though some data/photos are priceless, cheers
What did you charge for this recovery?
The Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001 doesn't need to be dropped in order to fail. It's one of the worst POS drives that was ever made.
So true, 8 out of 10 died in my NAS. After completely switching to Hitachi 3 years ago, I've had no failures anymore at all.
I'm running an ST3000DM008 and it's working great.
3 of mine died within a week from eachother, before I had my replacement drives in place.
Backblaze's "Hard disk reliability test" for 2015 shows Seagate ST3000DM001 winning the "worst disk by far"-award with a VERY good margin.
It certainly won my personal lifetime shitlist award hands down.
my ST3000DM003 died without any warning. Was listening to music on it and after it finished the song i heard three loud clicks and it was done. When i power it up it spins, makes three clicks and stops spinning.
I will replace the head as soon as i can afford a donor drive if i can get my hands on one.
You can see a vertical wobble in the dark shadow when you rotate the platters at 15:00... (dark shadow of the plate at the top left, hanging over the top platter). This a warped platter?
Hi, found this very interesting.
but also left my head in partition one way or another.
how is it possible one pair of heads work better then the others.. arent they meant to perform exactly the same since they were manufactured in mass-production? i mean i really cant understand the difference in reliability. from the one set of heads to another assuming the head replacements were new/intact.
could you enlighten me please? :)
anyway thanks for the vid.
greets
+Laurens Burssens Usually if we go through multiple sets of heads during a recovery it's because the platter is damaged and is impacting the heads while they are being used. Eventually it causes them to fail and we have to install another set of heads. On other recoveries, some heads just seem to work better than others. Typically we find that the close we get to the original manufacturing date, the better. This is due to slight...almost minuscule variations in the way they are produced.
+acsdata oh... So there actually might be a noticeable difference in performance when the donor and original heads didn't come from the same batch.
The reason why I watched this was actually because I had a kind of working drive. It was the same model. Everything seemed working right and didn't make disturbing noises. Just a little tiny and funny sound in the beginning when start reading the I'm guessing MBR. But that was all. And it seemed like it was stuck in read mode.
When connecting to an external Sata controller it showed up in Windows. But eventually disappeared. I figured there must have been a tiny issue with the heads.
I even opened up the drive and took a quick peek. Didn't see anything out of the usual.
I also messed up eventually by touching the platters.
Luckily there wasn't any data on them.
But yeah I was wonder if a head replacement could have fixed the drive.
PS: Thanks for the reply.
If a hard drive is not running, i.e. with parked heads, can it still get damaged by dropping?
RAID saves lives :) Great demo.
You did an absolute great job of recovering the data
but the worst scenario what could happen is if those platters are broken in pieces, in this case you have to puzzle those pieces together and then put them under an microscope, while extracting it,then align that data to other parts of the data were it belonges to, then use error correction to correct corrupted data , to recover and correct data as much as possible, then make backups of it on ssd and hdd drives to make sure it’s (tempuratury) save,
But such process is extreamly difficuilt, time consumming and very $1000 expensive, but it’s worth it if you cannot life without that data.
I have a hard drive that contains valuable photos and it got physically damaged. It has two surfaces of the 6 surfaces of the platters damaged. I send it to a recovery data company and they failed to retrieve anything saying that they can't read surfaces separately and that each single photo is divided along the 6 surfaces. I am surprised that they did not tell me this piece of information at the diagnostics before wr proceed with the data recovery.
Is what they are saying correct. A photo of around 50Mb will have to be divided on several surfaces not just one, since its a small file ?
Yes, what they are saying is correct. Each head reads an individual platter surface. If there are 6 heads, there are 3 platters total. You can generate a head map and read each platter surface individually, or deactivate a single head that is having a difficult time reading due to platter damage. However, the files themselves, will be striped across each surface, since the heads typically read a hundred thousand or so sectors on average, before switching to the next head. The type of head map depends on the drive. Some will read from the platter surfaces sequentially, and that helps get pretty good chunks of data, even if one head is completely unreadable. For example in most Seagate drives, the head mapping would be something like 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. etc. etc. So if head 2 couldn't be read, you would still have large chunks of data that would still be ok...but even then...if it's a 50MB file, it's still going to be fragmented to some extent.
Thank you so much for your response. So, does this mean that as long as the file/photo is 50 MB it can not be retrieved at all since it has been fragment and definitely one fragment lies in the damaged unreadable surface?
do not put it on from now on. TRY - currys / dixons do this service for you in the UK England ) its going to cost you in the 100's and upto 1000 pounds. if the whole drive is restored. the cost depends on how much data is recovered and time spent. If its just a few photo's it will cost I think about 200 or 300 pounds. Try Dixon's / Currys. They are the same company
what recovery software are you using ?
My HDD actuator damaged..Is any possibilities to recover data....
Great video, my friend dropped her external WD hard drive. It reads and mounts in Linux but data transfer is very slow, about 1hr for a 1GB file. Have you seen this before? If so, do you have any recommendations?
Most likely one head is damaged and severely degraded. What happens is, the heads that read the servo tracks are ok and the drive calibrates. Sometimes, depending on which head it is, you can still mount the drive and see the data because the bitmap can also be read. But when transferring data, when it needs to read from the platter surface with the damaged head, the drive will almost come to a standstill. If that is the case it would need the heads replaced to be able to read all platter surfaces.
Most likely one head is damaged and severely degraded. What happens is, the heads that read the servo tracks are ok and the drive calibrates. Sometimes, depending on which head it is, you can still mount the drive and see the data because the bitmap can also be read. But when transferring data, when it needs to read from the platter surface with the damaged head, the drive will almost come to a standstill. If that is the case it would need the heads replaced to be able to read all platter surfaces.
How could different sets of head not work? I mean they are all built the same or is it that there are minute micron differences that make the alignment or the patterns or such different so one head assembly would work and another not or is it something else involved?
Curious about the software used. Look interesting. Is it custom?
Can your Data Recovery Service also Recover overwritten Files after quick formatting SD Card?.
I can
What does job like this run the customer? Pretty tough swap and a long case!
please may I ask, what is the software which you are using in this video?
Deepspar Disk Imager
I tried to take apart a drive like this and the metal casing was stuck like cement.
Sometimes the rubber seal around the edge sticks pretty good and you just have to gently keep working around the perimeter of the drive until it works it's way loose.
What software did they use at minute 25 ?
May I know what is the software you are using?