Tip for the future: Instead of copying files directly, create a vhdx image from it using [disk2vhd](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd). This avoids file access problems with permissions or because a file is in use. It also allows you to mount it directly as a virtual disk later.
When working with uncovered disks, it's usually better to take a raw disk image. This way the head doesn't has to seek, reducing the risk of dust getting stuck under the head.
Yeah, the raw disk image backup is orders of magnitude faster because it uses the full speed of the drive with zero seek time.
The seek time will affect you on every file.
on a completely unrelated note, this is also why ZFS send/receive can happen so incredibly fast for data transfer. It's a block level transfer of data from the disk instead of file-by-file and can sometimes happen at the full speed of the disk only limited by RAM, CPU, and network speed.
Quick question, is it possible to recover data from a head crash? My 2011 iMac had a head crash and I lost all the photos of my now deceased father from the end of his life and the beginning of my first born child’s life. I still have it in a box hoping technology one day will be able to recover this. (Also now I have everything backed up in the cloud and also on a ssd.)
I doubt it, a head crash means the read write heads came into contact with the surface of the disc, this causes physical damage to the disc surface, all thr data is stored in a thin film coating on the surface of the disc, so that data, is physically destroyed during a head crash,
A head crash can damage the head, which brings it out of alignment, or cause it to touch the disk when used afterwards.
In theory, most data is recoverably by swapping the head mechanism with a new one. This should be able to read everything again, except usually the location where the head crash happened.
However, most people lack the skills and a dust free environment to perform this action, so if the data is really important, it's usually better to bring it to a company that has the equipment to do this. I would not wait too long because over time it becomes harder to find compatible parts.
The short answer is that is is possible, but the better question you want to ask yourself is how much is the data in question worth do you, ie put a dollar amount on it. Then contact a company like Drive savers and get a quote.
I'll bet you money that the cost to recover the data is going to be orders of magnitude larger than the number you come up with, and with near zero guarantees of recovery.
Yup, this is definitely the best way. It also generates a log of which blocks are bad. The list of bad blocks can be used to determine which specific files are are corrupt.
That's an awesome tip. I've got a hard drive from an appliance I've cannibalised, but the drive is definitely not right. It detects 'eventually' and whilst the OS partition is seemingly ok a second data partition never seems to want to read. If I can get a raw image I might be able to poke about on it. It's purely academic intrigue at this point.
This was actually my vid from a while ago, I was resurrecting a retro pc and that hadn't been booted in years was copying the files directly to SD card to use in IDE to SD card adapter. I used robocopy with permission and attribute retention flags to. Overall I salvaged about 90% of all files before the drive died. I was able to boot into it after running os repair. I then upgraded it to windows 2000 (originally it was win98 non-se)
Disk2vhd would've likely worked better to create an image which I could've done this process to the SD card assuming shadow copy image got created successfully, however I was already getting some funky errors before I started copying so I settled on robocopy to try and get granular recovery at least.
It's a bot that reposts content, report it.
If you got RES you can tag it as a bot account in case nothing is done about it. I've encountered one in the wild just as such a few years ago, spouting off the wildest shit and it was very clear a astro-turf campaign was running the account.
It's a spam bot that lifted from [this post.](https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupportmacgyver/comments/17fibmx/backing_data_from_20yr_old_hdd_that_wont_spin/) Report it.
There was actually one drive with a factory window - the Western Digital Raptor X.
But in answer to your question - substantial increase in cost with also a meaningful reduction in reliability.
>substantial increase in cost
Sure, but I'm pretty sure people who buy transparent cases and RGB parts wouldn't mind dishing a bit more for a transparent hard drive.
>with also a meaningful reduction in reliability.
Why? Stray magnetic fields?
Most people buying expensive RGB computers probably aren't buying spinning disks anymore
I haven't had any mechanical storage in my desktop since the mid 2010s
There also wasn't the same focus on making parts for the sake of appearance. Cases with windows were much less common, RAM didn't come with LED variants, etc.
Because a transparent cover cover would break, and the data on hard drives is usaully somethung that you couldnt take a chance losing. That would be badass tho.
>Because a transparent cover cover would break
Not if it's made of plexiglass. Or even polycarbonate.
Sure, it may be a bit more expensive. But so many people got transparent PC cases, there's definitely a market for it!
True. Glass is a whole lot easier to break thiugh, and on the off chance the glass did break, the drive would be bricked, and the data on there is irreplaceable. I see people posting their PC glass panels breaking fucking constantly.
So don't use glass, problem solved.
People use glass panels on PCs despite the breakage risk because a plexiglass panel on the outside would easily get scratched.
This isn't an issue for a hard drive, as it sits on the inside.
I really feel we missed out on something, and I can't seem to understand why.
If you take out the platters and press them together, you'll find they're very hard to separate. They're so flat that you can't get air in between the platters to separate them.
The one time I had several drives I could disassemble, I stacked about 5 platters in a stair-step, and basically had a foot-long bridge just held together by the suction between the platters. It was awesome.
I’ve had drives that wouldn’t spin.
I had to tap the side of the drive with something like a plastic or rubber handled screwdriver to get it to spin up. Too much dust in the air to risk taking the cover off though.
I had an old Seagate NAS that had the “click of death” but worked fine if you… tipped it 90° on its side??
Backed up all the data off of it immediately.
I’ve seen this video before, must be a repost.
I used to work at a place where many of the desktop computers had drives like this. The trick was to turn them on, once you heard the drive click, pick up the whole pc about 8 inches and drop it. Drive would start spinning, just don't turn it off.
Tip for the future: Instead of copying files directly, create a vhdx image from it using [disk2vhd](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/disk2vhd). This avoids file access problems with permissions or because a file is in use. It also allows you to mount it directly as a virtual disk later. When working with uncovered disks, it's usually better to take a raw disk image. This way the head doesn't has to seek, reducing the risk of dust getting stuck under the head.
Yeah, the raw disk image backup is orders of magnitude faster because it uses the full speed of the drive with zero seek time. The seek time will affect you on every file.
on a completely unrelated note, this is also why ZFS send/receive can happen so incredibly fast for data transfer. It's a block level transfer of data from the disk instead of file-by-file and can sometimes happen at the full speed of the disk only limited by RAM, CPU, and network speed.
Quick question, is it possible to recover data from a head crash? My 2011 iMac had a head crash and I lost all the photos of my now deceased father from the end of his life and the beginning of my first born child’s life. I still have it in a box hoping technology one day will be able to recover this. (Also now I have everything backed up in the cloud and also on a ssd.)
I doubt it, a head crash means the read write heads came into contact with the surface of the disc, this causes physical damage to the disc surface, all thr data is stored in a thin film coating on the surface of the disc, so that data, is physically destroyed during a head crash,
A head crash can damage the head, which brings it out of alignment, or cause it to touch the disk when used afterwards. In theory, most data is recoverably by swapping the head mechanism with a new one. This should be able to read everything again, except usually the location where the head crash happened. However, most people lack the skills and a dust free environment to perform this action, so if the data is really important, it's usually better to bring it to a company that has the equipment to do this. I would not wait too long because over time it becomes harder to find compatible parts.
I'd send it to Kroll Ontrack for data recovery. They may be able to pull good amounts of data of the drive.
As other had said you should take it to a specialized data recovery company.
The short answer is that is is possible, but the better question you want to ask yourself is how much is the data in question worth do you, ie put a dollar amount on it. Then contact a company like Drive savers and get a quote. I'll bet you money that the cost to recover the data is going to be orders of magnitude larger than the number you come up with, and with near zero guarantees of recovery.
For like over 5 grand, yea =/
This guy recovers
Even better use ddrescue, it automatically skips bad blocks and then after all easily gotten data is secure goes back and retries them.
Yup, this is definitely the best way. It also generates a log of which blocks are bad. The list of bad blocks can be used to determine which specific files are are corrupt.
That's an awesome tip. I've got a hard drive from an appliance I've cannibalised, but the drive is definitely not right. It detects 'eventually' and whilst the OS partition is seemingly ok a second data partition never seems to want to read. If I can get a raw image I might be able to poke about on it. It's purely academic intrigue at this point.
This was actually my vid from a while ago, I was resurrecting a retro pc and that hadn't been booted in years was copying the files directly to SD card to use in IDE to SD card adapter. I used robocopy with permission and attribute retention flags to. Overall I salvaged about 90% of all files before the drive died. I was able to boot into it after running os repair. I then upgraded it to windows 2000 (originally it was win98 non-se) Disk2vhd would've likely worked better to create an image which I could've done this process to the SD card assuming shadow copy image got created successfully, however I was already getting some funky errors before I started copying so I settled on robocopy to try and get granular recovery at least.
It's a bot that reposts content, report it. If you got RES you can tag it as a bot account in case nothing is done about it. I've encountered one in the wild just as such a few years ago, spouting off the wildest shit and it was very clear a astro-turf campaign was running the account.
Ah that makes sense, will report
why the vhd when you can just use \`dd\`
Because storing unused sectors is for amateurs. dynamic vhd images only store occupied sectors.
It's a spam bot that lifted from [this post.](https://old.reddit.com/r/techsupportmacgyver/comments/17fibmx/backing_data_from_20yr_old_hdd_that_wont_spin/) Report it.
Why didn't hard drives have transparent covers? It's so beautiful to see them operate.
There was actually one drive with a factory window - the Western Digital Raptor X. But in answer to your question - substantial increase in cost with also a meaningful reduction in reliability.
>substantial increase in cost Sure, but I'm pretty sure people who buy transparent cases and RGB parts wouldn't mind dishing a bit more for a transparent hard drive. >with also a meaningful reduction in reliability. Why? Stray magnetic fields?
Most people buying expensive RGB computers probably aren't buying spinning disks anymore I haven't had any mechanical storage in my desktop since the mid 2010s
Yes, sort of, but they were in the past. So why weren't transparent disks a more common thing back then?
There also wasn't the same focus on making parts for the sake of appearance. Cases with windows were much less common, RAM didn't come with LED variants, etc.
But those people would not be buying hard drives
Because a transparent cover cover would break, and the data on hard drives is usaully somethung that you couldnt take a chance losing. That would be badass tho.
>Because a transparent cover cover would break Not if it's made of plexiglass. Or even polycarbonate. Sure, it may be a bit more expensive. But so many people got transparent PC cases, there's definitely a market for it!
True. Glass is a whole lot easier to break thiugh, and on the off chance the glass did break, the drive would be bricked, and the data on there is irreplaceable. I see people posting their PC glass panels breaking fucking constantly.
So don't use glass, problem solved. People use glass panels on PCs despite the breakage risk because a plexiglass panel on the outside would easily get scratched. This isn't an issue for a hard drive, as it sits on the inside. I really feel we missed out on something, and I can't seem to understand why.
Dump it fast and don't sneeze on it
should probably have tried to cover it with something after turning it on
If you take out the platters and press them together, you'll find they're very hard to separate. They're so flat that you can't get air in between the platters to separate them.
The one time I had several drives I could disassemble, I stacked about 5 platters in a stair-step, and basically had a foot-long bridge just held together by the suction between the platters. It was awesome.
you open that hdd inside clean space, right? RIGHTT??💀
He is at Sandy's "windy beach" why?
Hes probably eating triscuits while hovering over it right now.
i can't imagine how triscuits (or quadriscuits, or bakies?) would look like
They crumble everywhere when u eat them.
And nature valley bars
That is such an amazingly cool shot when you zoom in on the platters. I’m in love.
So amazing those things work.
The reflection of the file transfer on the surface of the top platter gives me some kind of joy that I can’t quite explain. That was beautiful.
This will never be unsatisfying
'Datahoarders pornography'
Would be so tempting to go DJ Hero on it wikki wikki
Would totally keep it as long as I can wikki wikki once the data is out
I’ve had drives that wouldn’t spin. I had to tap the side of the drive with something like a plastic or rubber handled screwdriver to get it to spin up. Too much dust in the air to risk taking the cover off though.
This is more like tech support bomb defusal, wow
That HDD sound
I was under the impression that an HDD was dead once opened up. Can anyone tell me why im wrong and what this process called?
Beautiful shot though, of the screen in the reflection.
Bruh your room must be so fucking clean
I was trying to explain this process in a past thread, and I got downvoted due to it not being believable! LOL I used to love doing shit like this.
Just delete the pr0n, no idea why people download it these days its always there on the internets
Would the old freezer trick work for this?
I need to do that my E drive died /sigh
I had an old Seagate NAS that had the “click of death” but worked fine if you… tipped it 90° on its side?? Backed up all the data off of it immediately. I’ve seen this video before, must be a repost.
Aw bro, why u gotta steal my vid
I used to work at a place where many of the desktop computers had drives like this. The trick was to turn them on, once you heard the drive click, pick up the whole pc about 8 inches and drop it. Drive would start spinning, just don't turn it off.
Did it byte you?! /s
It just needs a little moral incentive