Crashed Hard Disk

[rraehal]

A user at my office brought me his laptop. (A Dell C600) He said the system was giving him an error about no valid boot devices. I figured out the Hard Disk had gone bad.

I replaced the drive and set up his laptop with a fresh ghost of Windows XP.

I decided to try and recover his files. Our Laptop IDE to USB convertor would power up the drive but it was clear that the platters would not spin. I reomved the drive cover. I powered it up again and saw the heads move but the platters stay still.

I used a screw driver in the top screw (that hold the platters together) and got the platters to break free. I plugged in the drive with it still open and I was able to recover all the files from the drive.

I was under the impression that opening a hard drive would instantly ruin it. In this case I figured nothing would be lost since it didn't work anyway. Maybe I should try this more often.

I even recorded a short video of it working without the cover because I thought it was cool (4.3MB):
Movie Here (http://www.hermanmillercolorado.com/movies/harddisk.mpg)
:)

[Sterling_Aug]

Hard drives can in fact be opened and used for a short time while open.

A drive case is not air tight sealed. There is a small, filtered opening for air to balance the pressures between the inside of the case and room air pressure.

I saw a web site once where a guy went into his bathroom, turned on a hot shower to steam up the room, he then opened the hard drive case and wrapped it in cello wrap, then cut a hole in the cover and mounted a plexglas window on the case cover. The drive worked like a charm and he could watch the inside workings of the drive as it wrote data.

[rraehal]

That process seems a tad extreme but it would be a unique drive at a LAN Party.

Seems to me the bearing is bad in the drive. I went to zero wipe the drive before disposal and had to break the platters free again.

[cromwelt]

Nice! Thanks for the video too.
Job well done. Maybe I should try this on my seized up drive..