What to do with a grinding hard drive
Ways to save your data
For a data recovery lab, having someone say "My hard drive was making a grinding noise" is about as bad as it gets. If you're not familiar with what a hard drive looks like, imagine your old vinyl records stacked on top of each other. In between each layer of vinyls (top and bottom) are read/write heads that both put on, and extract data. However, unlike those vinyls of old, heads inside the hard drive are not meant to ever touch the platters.
Modern day hard drives store data via magnetic variations. If those read/write heads touch the platter, it means that part of the magnetically stored information is being physically wiped away. It will turn to fine dust and depending on how much of the platter gets wiped away, you can kiss any chance of retrieving your data good bye.
If you have a grinding hard drive:
Turn it off immediately! Do not run any recovery software on it Do not put it in the freezer Find a data recovery expert if you want that data back
Turning it off The longer you allow the computer to run, the more of the platter's surface area you are going to destroy. If you destroy the part of the drive that helps the computer interpret what information belongs where, it's over. If you're lucky and only destroy the bit of data you were just working on, a lab should be able to recover the rest. However, the more you try to get that last bit, the more of the platter you will turn to powder.
DO NOT run recovery software We had a drive come in where an otherwise competent computer repair specialist who tried to run a software utility to get at the data. He allowed the software to run for hours despite the noise coming from the drive. When the high pitched grinding noise finally gave way to a clicking noise, he then called us. Two perfectly concentric gouges and fine powder is all we were left with. Needless to say, the client never got their data back. A software utility will not do anything to help a hardware failure!
DO NOT put it in the freezer We've heard people testify to the success of this method. We've also seen dozens of drives come in with corroded boards. This does nothing to decrease the cost of your data recovery job. Freezing the drive when heads are grinding might force the metal to contract (and therefore separate) and no longer have contact between the platter and the head, but it doesn't solve the problem that the head is still dead! Instead, you'll have a dead head, a corroded board, and a very expensive recovery job!
Find an expert The person who gave us the ground down drive advertises that he recovers data. The technician in question is an extremely competent trouble shooter. He is great at building, fixing, and patching up networks, but data recovery is not his forte. If the drive went straight to an expert, the odds of data recovery would have been much higher. Just because somebody knows something about computers, it doesn't mean they know everything!
The bottom line is, if your data is important to you, you must take the right steps to safe guard it. If something seems not quite right, STOP. Losing data is much more likely to happen than your home burning down. You buy insurance for you home, yet most people don't think twice about a small investment to back up their data. Make sure you know what that data is worth to you and whether or not a $100 hard drive is worth saving thousands of dollars down the road.
About the Author
As a consultant with Revival Technologies, Terri works with clients in finding solutions to data loss prevention
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