I had a faithful old Dell laptop that I remembered to backup to my linux raid server fairly often, until I moved. After four months my hard drive went silent. No click-of-death, just some hideous squeaks then nothing. I hooked it up to my desktop as a slave, hoping that the OS was shot, but no dice.
I googled hard drive repair and found very few references, but quite a few service providers. I contacted them and their quotes were 800-900 bucks. No thanks. In fact, I could probably live without that 4 months worth of stuff, but it was sucking more every day as I thought of stuff trapped on there.
I found lots of hard drive repair articles about software fixes and PCB replacements, but I seemed to have a case of bad motor bearings. None of that stuff could help. And yes, I tried putting it in the freezer. I got a cold hard drive that didn't work.
I guess I should just throw away the bad drive, huh? But, if I have nothing to lose....
The solution of course starts with ebay.
I was one of the very few bidders for 3 year old Toshiba 30G laptop hard drive. Fortunately just the right model was available. God help you if this isn't the case.
Here is my old drive and new, ready to go in my clean room. My clean room consisted of the dining room table with some landscaping plans that were laying around. I did take the extraordinary step of locking out the cats (who were PISSED) but failed to turn off the ceiling fan, which was probably wrong in hindsight.
Tools needed:
- #6 and 7 torx drivers ($18 for a set at home depot. I had to ask where the were, not obvious)
- teeny phillips screwdrivers (you probably have these)
- A cheapo dentil pick set from Harbor Freight. Very handy.
- Ziploc brand hard drive platter replacement mitts with yellow-and-blue-make green zip closures.
- A laptop IDE to desktop IDE adapter for recovery on a desktop
- (maybe??) a USB external hard drive box.
After marking them new and old (PCB and chassis) with a marker, my first step was removing the PCB. this is just a bunch of little philips screws. Here are the assemblies. Note there is a funny little rubber gasket between the PCB's and the chassis:
(In hindsight this step was unecessary. Everything can be accesses from the other side)
Next you flip over the chassis and unscrew the little torx screws that hold the cover on. You always know you are disassembling something you shouldn't be when you are using torx drivers. One of my screws was under the label, so be sure to find them all. The cover comes of with some persuasion, they are sort of glued on with a little sticky gasket.
I was lucky, because my little old hard drive was a single platter variety, with just two r/w heads. Also, because it is a laptop drive, it's heads park in this little plastic doohicky to keep them safe (although I bet all HDs have these). I have read some stuff about the problem of re-aligning multiple platters, about how that may be impossible (can't be, see $900 service providers above) or that it's easy because they come out as a unit (likely).
In this surgery, I figured I had one drive with a platter I cared about, and mechanisms I didn't care about (old drive) and one with a platter I didn't care about and mechanisms that I did (new drive). With this in mind, I took apart the new one first. The goal was to get the platter out while not damaging the gizmos. There is a single screw holding on a little cover, (above right below) which tightened down on a little spacer (below that). With those gone, you see the last thing holding the platter on. It needs to be unscrewed, which is tricky. I used my cheapo harber freight dentil picks to poke in the little holes you see in the picture. (noting with disgust that little metal filings are coming off my picks...) It isn't too hard to get that fastener loosened up, then just turn it a few times until it comes off.
(Note the specs of dust. What's the worst that could happen?) This pic shows the biggest problem of them all: the plastic doohicky that the heads park in. Note that it is above and below the platter. And, once the platter has been freed of it's connecters in the middle, (not shown here) it cannot quite be freed from the chassis, because the doohicky prevents it from all lifting up at once. And, you can't remove it without disturbing the heads, which I was determined not to do. The solution was to loosen the screw attaching it to give it a tiny bit of play. Then I could just barely get the platter out.
Next grab your Ziploc brand hard drive platter replacement mitts and turn over the chassis and get it to plop out. I had to use way more force than I wanted to.
Free at last!!
The doner:
I then repeated the steps on the old drive with the platter with the data. And yes, I could confirm that the spinning motor was completely frozen up. The new one turned like a dream though. I got the platter off and placed it carefully in the new chassis. Again, screwing down the little connectors that hold the platter down was the hardest part. I used the dentil picks again, and only lost control and scraped the platter once and touched it with my bare finger merely once. I put it all back together, attached the new PCB, and installed it in my PC with a laptop adapter:
And.... it fails completely. My PC won't even boot. But it is at least spinning, but not making happy noises. It sounds like click-of-death. Not good. This is where I think I should have gotten a USB HD kit, so that at least I could plug/unplug this contraption to see if it worked a little bit. With this setup the drive had to be fully working to get anything at all.
A shame and regret cycle began and I slept on it. The next night I tried desperate actions. I suspected the heads were not right with the position of the plastic doohicky. I moved it around a few positions. I also moved the heads around. My expectation is that the heads should move around effortlessly, and glide over the surface of the platter when powered off. Instead, they clamped down alarmingly on the platter as soon as they cleared the doohicky. Really really bad. The heads are scraping over my data. I limited this as much as possible, but the damage was done. I tried a few cycles of fooling with stuff and trying to reboot, but nothing changed.
Then I tried looking at the PCB. At that point I realized I had forgotten to replace the little rubber gasket that insulated the PCB from the chassis. I replaced the gasket, but no help. Then I swapped in the old PCB, with gasket. Then, VICTORY.
The drive was in fact slow, but worked. I didn't even use any fancy data recovery SW, I just dragged and dropped. There were in fact a few files that I could not recover (none I cared about, thank God).
One thing I noted was that my new ebay drive's screws came off *much easier* than my old one. Coincidence? Also, the new PCB appeared to not work, though it could have been the gasket mistake ruining it. Frankly I think I got "ripped off" on my hard drive, but since I only needed a few parts to work I ended up a satisfied customer. Last step? format hard drive and sell on ebay (kidding).
Lessons:
1) I don't know how many hard drives this sloppy non-clean-room technique would really fix, but clearly it isn't totally critical.
2) These things are a lot more robust than some would have you believe. I tapped the platter with metal instruments, got a finger print on it, and a modest amount of dust. Then I scraped the heads a few mm onto the platter. Maybe that was OS data or something, but the heads were ok.
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