Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
From: EP
Subject: dead hard drive
Dave,
I would really like to learn something about getting data from drives that clunk or have a burned board. Your link to 200 ways does not work.
Could you be of any help to me?
Ezra
As far as drives that clunk, unless the system recognizes it enough that you can run SpinRite on it, I don’t know how to do it. A clunk can be indicative of a lot of different things, from a crashed head (very difficult–you’ll need a cleanroom to get anything) to a simple bad sector (very easy–sometimes even something as lame as ScanDisk can save you sometimes; SpinRite almost always will).
Drives that have a burned board are easier. If you can track down an identical drive, you can swap the board and usually get the data back. I’ve done that a couple of times. The hard part is tracking down an identical drive.
Sorry I couldn’t be more help.
Dave
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.