Digital BW, The Print

On 13/05/2013 21:55, Paul wrote:
> I must say, it's been a very long time since I've had a hard disk crash

What kind of crash Paul? If it still spins up, is not making unhealthy 
noises such as bearing gring or click of death (heads cannot calibrate , 
and is detected by the BIOS, there is a very good chance of easy recovery.

If the disk appears in the BIOS, but does not mount in the OS, the problem 
is nearly always a corrupted MBR and/or partition table. The drivers and 
OS cannot recognise the corrupt sector 0 as a drive.

In 90% of cases everything can be recovered without data loss. The disk 
can be returned to service as there is almost always nothing wrong with it 
at a hardware level. It was only corrupted in the first place by 
software/OS/drivers and/or power loss. The same applies to camera memory 
cards.

Provided you can get driverless access to them, they are generally easy to 
fix. I've recovered many such disks. I use Active Partition Recovery DOS 
version to erase the damaged MBR and partition table (with the IgnoreMBR 
parameter), then scan for files and recreate new healthy versions. This 
has always worked with NTFS, I think. The only partly unsuccessful 
recoveries were FAT, although all newer files were recovered that were 
missing from backups.

This also works to recover flash memory cards that the OS can't see due to 
MBR/PT corruption, but you need an IDE card reader so you can access the 
hardware direct. People usually throw perfectly good cards away, imagining 
they've somehow broken. It's seldom more than sector 0 corruption.

Where disk hardware is failing Spinrite is excellent. But that is much 
rarer, and the symptoms are usually obvious clicking or bearing noise, or 
simply not spinning up. Motor failures are rare, but platter bearings fail 
from heat and lubricant drying over many years.

You can be creatively destructive there. I had a laptop drive fail, 
clearly a platter bearing problem as it was noisy and eventually seized. I 
had good backups as insurance, but the newest was missing some recent 
work. Rather than spend a few hours redoing that, I bored a small hole 
through the casing in the bearing area with a scalpel and inserted 2 drops 
of WD40. I then removed the lid from the drive, and used a matchstick on 
the edge of the platter to nudge it into life. It span up perfectly! I was 
then able to clone the disk to a new one without errors.

I left it running to see how long it would last, and it was about 3hrs 
total before errors began to appear, and then it quickly degraded to 
roadkill in another hour. I had made no effort to reinstate a temporary 
lid to keep airborne particulates away, and this is far from a 'clean room'.

Worth a try if bearing seizure is the cause. A more cautious version would 
omit removing the lid, and simply let the bearing soak an hour or two. 
Light machine oil like 3in1 would be wiser than WD40, too.

I am not a fan of cloud offsite backup unless your needs are light. Photo 
data volumes are impractical. DSL & network speeds mean recovering a few 
TB could take weeks.

-- 
Regards

Tony Sleep
http://tonysleep.co.uk