I fix hard drives occasionally and how the drive failed is the factor that will determine if the data is lost.
Satistically, HDs fail as follows....
Onboard Controller Card E2PROM loosing / forgetting factory settings - 60% of failures.
Platter / Head crash - 30% of failures.
Onboard Controller Card failure - 10%.
If the drive is a Quantum Fireball then it has a 100% chance of having the head arm controller chip catching fire with the odds of how soon increasing expotentially as the HD's platter size grows past 13 G.Bytes. These drives do actually catch fire!!
I've binned over 50 so far!!
Onvoard E2Prom failures.... you'll need a friend with a special card called a "HD Factory E2PROM programmer" built into a modified PC, which converts it into a specialist tool. The card costs just over £900 in the UK and I own four of them.
Such a modifed PC allows one ot have the powers of God over hard discs and even raise apparently dead HDs from the grave / skip.
Take a HD I fixed at the charity factory unit during the week.... a Samsung 40 G.Byte.
Right, POST on the donated PC didn't even acknowledge it was conected, as clear symptom of E2PROM feck up.
I plug it up to the HD repair rig and after a couple of seconds of poking it, the HD repair rig reports that the E2PROM on the HD is controller card is claiming that the HD has 65535 tracks, 14 heads and 63 sectors even though it actually has 16 heads.... Do I want to correct the error Y/N??
I hit "Y" and the E2PROM is corrected.
The HOTFIX is also turned off (The HD can't do housekeeping without this and will slowly feck up over the months of use!!) so I turn it back on again.
I put the HD back into its home PC and it works again, fires up properly and everything is fixed.
I've had numerous IT geeks tell me that a normal PC can do this with software and so I ask them how the software managed to overcome the missing Task 0 and Task 1 pins omitted on normal PC HD controllers?? Can't mess with the E2PROM without them!!
$50 for basically switchng on a HD rig, pressing F2, followed by 4 other key presses and the drive is fixed in the time it takes to type this.... that's a good profit margin for just under a minute's work!!
I'd fix it for a beer if you lived locally to me in the UK!!
Chances are your data is still safe inside, just inaccessable rather like a safe with a broken lock.
Modern HDs have more robust heads and platters than in the old days.
Back in the early 1980's the HD was a Warp Cored sized thing in the middle of the computer room and head crashes were more like a grenade going off!!
People who've been around HDs for a very long time, like myself, still have panic attacks when anybody mentions "Run Length Limited" drives.... even mentioning them is considered bad luck in older vertran computer engineer circles.
The average RLL HD lasted about a year out of the box before it failed!!
Out of all the thousands of MFM, ESDE, IDE, EIDE and SCSI (I automatically chuck RLL drives straight into the bin!!) I've fixed over the years at repair shops and home, I've never actually had to rebuild a hard disc's mechanics as all the failures were 2/3rd E2PROM errors or controller card compnent failures.
Topic: Hard Drive question (Read 1642 times)