How to recover data from a hard drive (stuck heads: buzzing, clicking, etc)

hello and welcome to this harddrive data recovery video now the drive we are going to try and recover the data from is this laptop hard drive now when you're repairing a hard drive the first thing to do is have a listen to how it sounds because that can tell a lot about what's actually wrong with it so let's plug this into an external drive enclosure and see what kind of sound it makes so as you can hear that does not sound very promising for our little hard drive now to me it sounds like it's having trouble spinning up this is what a hard drive should sound like and this clearly did not sound like that so what that says to me is that perhaps the motor has gone but I think the more likely reason for it not spinning up is that the hard drive heads have gotten stuck on the hard drive platter which is preventing it from starting to spin so the first thing you can try is hit it sideways onto a table surface you can try it whilst it's trying to spin up because it can actually help to get the heads loose but this can obviously cause damage so I stress and only do it if you can't afford data recovery so that's the first thing you can try and if that doesn't work what you can try doing is what this video is actually going to be about which is opening the drive and moving the heads off the platters manually so to open a drive you need a set of Torx screwdriver bits and a screw driver obviously so the first thing to do is just select a screw driver bit that actually fits your screws in most laptop drives this is t6 so that's the drew screw driver bit I'm going to use and we can begin just to remove this top cover okay so before we start opening this drive up I must stress that if you're planning and doing this at home that you are doing it under your own risk because I'm not a harddrive technician or anything I'm just sharing my experiences with opening up drives and restoring the data from them okay so with that out of the way let's begin opening this up now you've probably heard that opening a drive in anything but a cleanroom causes the drive to be destroyed basically and there is kind of truth in this but I'm not sure how much of it is true because I think some of it is just sort of like scare stories spread by data recovery centers so that they get more sort of business but it is true that you do want to keep just landing inside here to a minimum because I suppose it can interfere with the heads reading the data but I don't think it causes anything to be destroyed it just interferes really and so when you are opening your pure drive just make sure that you try and keep it as clean as possible and before you put the lid back on just blow on it just to make sure that any dust that has landed on it has been blown off but if there are some leftover bits of dust these are likely to fly off the platter when it's the when the hard drive is turned on by both centrifugal force and by the draft this caused when it's on and there is a little filter which I'll point out later which does catch stray particles so it's not too much of an issue but if you are really concerned about stray particles landing on the platter compromising data what you can do is make a clean air and closure which is basically just a box a fan and a filter and you can open the drive in there I might make a video later at some point on how to make one of these clean air enclosures and but it does just depend on the demand because it's a bit of a niche thing to sort of want really anyway so once you've gotten all the screws undone there is usually one last screw under the sticker and you can usually find it by scratching the surface with your fingernail until you find an indentation and then once you find it you can stick your screwdriver do the sticker and undo it that way so let's take a look and if our theory was correct the hard drive head should be on the platter which it is so as you can see the hard drive head is in the middle of the platter and it should actually be parked just here which it clearly is not so what we can try and do is manually push this into the parked position so to do this I'm going to use a little hook which is actually just a dental thing and what we need to do is just turn the hard drive platters whilst we are pulling on the head just to reduce the stress so always turn it counterclockwise as that will ensure that you don't pull the heads underneath the actual head unit so I've just I'm just going to use the screwdriver because there is a screw in the center spindle so we can just turn this and pull on the head [Music] and there we go as you could hear that sounded like they were really really stuck so I have no idea whether this drive is actually going to work after being so stuck just check the drive for any big particles and it seems okay so we'll just put the lid back on and by the way this is the little filter I was talking about and this catches any particles that might have landed on the hard drive platter so we'll just put the lid back on and see whether it works so now that the hard drive is back together let's get the hard drive caddy and look at it and just see if it starts spinning and whether it is detected by the operating system and it's worth noting that I do have disk management open so that we can see whether the drive is detected by the computer because sometimes it might have an incompatible drive letter and then wouldn't be mounted so we've just got disk management open so that we can see all drives that are connected to the system so let's turn it on and hopefully let's go spin up oh my goodness there it is there's the drive two hundred thirty two gigabytes detected and successfully working so we'll just add a drive letter to it and hopefully all the data will be accessible so I've just added the drive letter to one of the partitions as you saw and here are the files all on that drive so hopefully I'll be able to get all these off but it does look like they are accessible see if we can go into a desktop and everything so I'll just start these transferring so now that we've got all the data off what I'm going to do is just run a error scan of the entire surface of the drive just so that we can see how much of it actually is damaged and how much is still usable so we'll just start it off right so as you can see the scan is detecting a few damaged inaccessible sectors now I think that these have been caused by the head actually making contact with the platters rather than particles that were let into the drive because it really was quite stuck so I'm actually quite surprised it's not worse than this but it's just worth noting that the data percent of damaged blocks is only two percent which means that even if it was 100 percent full 98 percent of the data would be able to be recovered which is it's a decent number so I hope that if you have had the same issue with your hard drive that this video has been somewhat useful in helping you to fix it now a good look if you do attempt it and remember that it is at your own risk so I hope you enjoyed this video and if you are interested in DIY things you can perhaps check out my channel and maybe subscribe if you think it's interesting enough I'm Matt and thank you for watching oh by the way in my next video I think I might try transplanting some hard drive platters just to see whether it works so stay tuned for that okay yeah goodbye [Music]

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 12,441,485

Keywords: hdd, hard disk, hard, drive, repair, fix, recover, data recovery, recovery, broken, laptop, fix laptop hard drive, external, spin, computer, restore, click of death, clicking, buzzing, clicking hard drive, hard drive not showing, dead hard drive, stuck heads, platters, diyperks, beeping

Id: F5Y7BniaRXg

Length: 10min 27sec (627 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 22 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/DecriMarco]

By doing this I recovered hundreds of photos I tought were lost. Only 6-7 files were corrupted.