200 ways to revive a hard drive
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200 ways to revive a hard drive
We based one of our most popular pop quiz challenges on a situation every tech support person has
faced or will face at least once:
a failed hard drive
. In that particular case, a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 user
was getting errors like "disk 0 error" and "invalid drive specification." Here were the other facts in the
case:
The data wasn't backed up.
The problem came out of nowhere.
The user had accessed Setup and tried to manually enter the settings for the drive type when "Auto"
didn't work.
There was no startup disk made by this machine.
Reviving a drive like that one¡ªeven if only long enough to copy its data before you throw the drive in the
garbage¡ªis a tough challenge. When I asked TechRepublic members how they would troubleshoot a
situation like this one, we received over 200 solutions, and we heard from a number of TechRepublic
members who wanted to know "what everybody else suggested." So we decided to publish this collection
of over 200 ways to revive a hard drive.
In editing this document, we tried as much as possible to preserve the voices of the TechRepublic
members who submitted these solutions. Of course, as the legal blurb at the end of the document
declares, we can't promise that
any
of these tips will work in every setting. But we thought you'd enjoy
reading what your fellow IT professionals had to say on this subject. Enjoy!
How to revive a hard drive
Freeze it....................................................................................2
Drop it ......................................................................................9
Hit it........................................................................................10
The rest of the solutions ........................................................14
Page 1


200 ways to revive a hard drive
www.techrepublic.com
Freeze it
From: Travis Standen
One trick I have learned as a technician, when the problem is data-read errors off the platters themselves,
is to
freeze
the hard drive overnight. It makes the data more 'readable,' but for a one-shot deal. If this
data is critical, and you have a replacement hard drive (which, if it's a drive failure, you probably do), then
you can hook up your frozen hard drive and immediately fetch the data off before it warms up.
From: Thedeedj
If the problem is heat related, I put the drive in the
freezer
for about 15 minutes to cool it down...
sometimes this gets the drive up long enough to copy any critical files...
From: Itguy1
Put the drive in a waterproof sealed bag, put it in the fridge for an hour or so, then have another go.
From: Kelly Reid
Well, I won't start playing with your specific situation, too many steps or possible solutions where
everything starts "If that last thing didn't work try..."
But I'll give you one for free that was a nice hero moment for me. Had a drive where it sounded like the
drive motor was engaging but not getting anywhere, so we stuck it in the office
freezer
for an hour! I'll be
darned if it didn't work. The drive was up long enough to get the data ghosted to another drive and we
turfed it, even though it sounded fine at that point. I can't really take credit for it though¡ªI had heard it in
some geek bull session but I thought it was some jedi-geek urban myth. Goes to show you that you know
you're really screwed when you say something to the effect of "Okay, hold on tight, I'm gonna try
something I saw in a cartoon once but I'm pretty sure I can do it"
From: mpicpu
If this drive isn't spinning up, putting it in the
freezer
for about an hour will usually get the drive spinning
again so you can copy needed files before the drive warms up again. The first thing you want to do is run
a disk utility like Norton disk doctor or wddiag (if it's a western digital drive) to verify whether the drive is
working mechanically or not. If it is a master boot record problem, sometimes running Fdisk/mbr will
correct the problem. It could also be a virus, and a program like F-prot will look at the drive as a physical
unit. As an A+ PC technician I have seen this problem many times. Usually if the drive is not making a
clicking sound I am successful in recovering the data.
From: Scott Greving
I've run into this scenario numerous times. One time it involved the main Novell SYS volume on our HP
File Server. I was really sweating as the server would not boot. I took the drive out and put it in a