3 stiction drives in a row

[pcpete]

We have gotten lucky unsticking 3 heads on the last three drives we have tried with a wrist flick. Before everyone starts yelling at me, we did tell the clients this in an email.

As to the data on your failed drive we may be able to recover that. The issue appears that the internal read head is stuck on the the platter with the information. We have two options to deal with this. If the data is super important, we would want to send it out to a professional who will open it up in a clean room. They can do it in such a way as not to make things worse. The downside it it is expensive. If the data could be recovered, you would be looking at a rate of about $850 assuming they did not have to replace any read heads. Option 2 is we have some techniques we can use in house that sometimes work, but they can also make things worse. if we could do this in shop, you would be looking at $199

Let us know how you would like to proceed

The crazy thing is it stuck a second time after powering it down before walking it over to get imaged. After that I did not let it power down again.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Reminds me of waaaaaaay back, before I was even thinking of doing IT for a living, I was in my....mid twenties, working at a maritime museum (Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut). Back at that time their offices had the old Apple Mac ...early models like the Macintosh I, II, Plus...a little later on a few of the Motorola Power PCs (Apple clones) that Apple allowed for a few years.

Anyways, one of the computers at a gate was having issues, and I had to open it up one morning to let one of the IT girls in to fix the issue. She took out the hard drive, and slammed it down on the counter once or twice...put it back in. I remember her talking about something often would "stick"...and doing that knocked it free. She put the drive back in, powered it up..and it booted up.

I know those in drive recovery businesses will cringe and yell at people who do that. Of course, techniques such as this are only done AFTER acknowledging that it can be a death sentence to the drive, and that the possibility of peeling important data/files from the drive greatly diminish after doing this.

We used to do the "freezer trick" many times with success, when the bearings seize up. Yes the drive gets wet with condensation as it warms up, may need another trip to the freezer if it heats up and seizes again...but the trick was successfully used many times over my >25 years of doing this. Of course after the client denied sending the drive out and paying a lot....it's used as a last ditch effort...we don't mention it up front.