How to recover data from bad filesystems AND broken disks!

[benali72]

As all of you know, there are lots of problems that can happen on a disk that might lose your data --

*  Software problems (eg: filesystem corruption, etc)
*  Hardware problems (eg: your disk is failing or has failed, etc)
*  Mixture of the two (eg: hardware error for bad clusters causes filesystem corruption, etc)

I found a FANTASTIC series of articles that covers all aspects of how to save your data and/or your disk over at www.GeekyProjects.com.  The articles are all by Pablo Garcia and they are really excellent.  They seem to cover ALL the angles. 

Try this url to start -- http://geekyprojects.com/storage/how-to-recover-data-from-a-broken-hard-drive/

I've downloaded and saved the articles to a folder for future reference.

[Peter Gibbons]

benali72,

Thanks for the link.

I have seen or thought about some of those solutions but it's nice to have them all in a single place.

Here is one tip from me:

I have had this happen with 2 or 3 drives I have owned:

At one point of time the drive stopped working because the platters wouldn't spin. All it took was to open the cover and spin the platters by hand for a while. That was enough the get the drive working again long enough to transfer the data.

[benali72]

You can open the drive and touch the platters without damaging them? I thought that was strictly forbidden (by a "clean-room" mentality) from the articles I read. This really worked for you?

PS-- did you see the technique of putting drives in the freezer. I thought that one was pretty wild...

Thanks.

[Peter Gibbons]

You can open the drive and touch the platters without damaging them?

Yes. Just don't touch the surface. Hold them the way you would hold a CD disk and force them to spin.

If the spindle is stuck and it can't move on its own the drive is already toast.

So this technique is useful to just get the data to another drive.

[dinotech]

I thought of the clean room when I read this post.  I suppose if you are careful and make sure you don't touch the platters, you're okay.  It's nice to know there is an alternative to sending the disk out at $2000 to $5000 for data recovery.

Peter, how many times have you had to do that?  Was it just the one time?  I do know of the freezer option and my colleagues have used it but I haven't.

D

[Peter Gibbons]

Dino,

IIRC this happened at least two times for me.
Maybe my solution fixes the same problem as putting the HD in the freezer.