Hard drive recovery tool

So can this process work better than http://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/tech-services/get-help-now/hard_drive_recovery/?

C

Your concept of Dust free is very different from the data recovery companies. To You a dust free room must equal a vacuum but dust is electrostatically charged to cling to most surfaces (hence when dusting you use a spray with chemical that is charged to attract dust) so removing just the air would not remove dust in the chamber that's attached to the enclosure and can come free and drift onto the platters. Data retrieval companies use specialized room that cost hundred of thousand dollars to build and it would make your project so expensive it would not be financial feasible.

Perhaps start with something like a DIY sandblasting chamber or paint box. Microfibre cloths could be used to help. You don't need to get it perfect, just good enough to do the fix and get the data off (before scrapping the disks).

http://www.railroad-line.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=31559

In a DIY scenario you could buy a matching drive and swap the platters over. I believe that the pros use the spares from the various drives they recover so can do it cheaper.

All of the disk failures I've had have been recovered with software and I've got part images off the disk. I believe the disks degraded with age rather than any catastrophic failure. So they did not need taking apart.

Correct Bill, then as vacuum oblige to make small rooms, has a considerable cost to make it and keep and has also the problem of involving a lot of issues, after a correct dust removal (but the chamge is usually always dust-free as it is used just for this scope), instead of a vacuum chamber it is used a inert gas filled chamber, or anyway a sort of controller atmosphere.

Enrico

actually the chamber is not always dust free, dust survives even in a vacuum or with inert gases. Plus the smallest of these vacuum chambers (with glove holes so you can work on the hard drive in the vacuum, chamber) cost is right around 1600 dollars. Next and the most important reason this is a bad idea, as any computer tech of any length of time will tell you, unless you are a trained and work for a data retrieval company, don't mess with it. Leave it to the professionals. Its different if the hard drive is detected in Bios, or it simply does not spin up those are external hard ware issues or software issues that a little research and time any one can fix.

After a bit of looking around I have found a few people who are successfully re activating drives by taking them apart in dust limited environments, (kitchen table or bench) it seems to be luck of the draw if the problem is not fixable bey replacing the circuit board.

This is interesting

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIPZtJyrVPw

I was hoping for some sort of mechanised way of removing the lid, solving the drive problem and then extracting the data in one machine! (I would also like the moon on a stick)

No harm  in dreaming I suppose!

But this video is related to the head replacement, that is "easier" (in a certain sense) than data recovery.

Dust is minor but the video shows one of the worst dangers, if careful you can remove the heads with out scratching them, but one little scratch and you can literately turn a savable data situation into a no data situation. The Man who made the video is a data retrieval specialist. What I am saying is take it to a specalist to prevent a DIYer from making a bad mistake. In my home to prevent this I have my computer in a Raid zero config which stripes my data onto two drives which speed up programs to run but all important data I have saved to my NAS (network attached storage) which is in a Raid 1 configuration which mirrors my data on two hard drives tho I am thinking of upgrading my NAS to a Drobo.