can a failed hard disk drive be repaired and usable again?

Question

i.e. one with many bad sectors or one that had previously unrecgnized by the operating system?

Answer 1

Not worth the time and effort. A professional service could do it, but, bad sectors on the HD is not a problem that is repairable in the home situation. A new HD is MUCH cheaper.

Answer 2

Yes and no. You actually have asked several questions. It depends on exactly what is wrong with the drive. Let me start with the easiest, a drive recognized, but has errors or is not readable. Normal wear and tear eventually poses several problems. Bearing wear and the disk/head alignment changes over time. Moving parts wear, period. Even though the heads "float" on a cushion of air when the disks are spinning, there is some wear still taking place on the head and disk surface. So, both of these tend to cause head/track/sector alignment to get out of alignment and eventually the alignment is bad enough a sector fails to read properly. Modern drives keep a bad sector table internally so when one fails, the drive marks it as bad and ignores it ever after. This type of failure CAN sometimes be salvaged, with a "low level" format procedure. First, understand this, when you "format" a hard disk, you only initialize part of the data recorded in each sector, the "data" frame. The header was written at the factory and never gets written to again under normal circumstances. While the data protion of the sector is written by the head so it always is aligned, the header information portion is the part which gets out of alignment. So, the solution is to write new header information, the "low level" format performed at the factory. There are programs which can do this. Symantec, Ontrack Systems and others have programs which will perform this on most drives. There is a potential problem with newer high capacity drives in that they do not contain the ability to perform a low level format. The tolerances on this kind of drive are simply too tight and if it ever wears enough to go out of alignment with the headers, it is too worn to be able to maintain ANY alignment and thus, becomes a paperweight. Next, there is magnetic damage to the data in the boot sectors which can happen from a virus or a power surge or simply turning it off at the singular wrong moment. There are programs out there from above manufacturers which can access the drive by "brute force" by manipulating the drive directly instead of through the operating system. This usually allows the program to read ANY sector. The question is this, what exactly is this in this sector? So, they start by looking for the partition table, boot track, FAT, directory and file system information. These places are defined for various ways disks are partitioned and formatted for various operating systems. The software can "build" an image of what was there and reconstruct it so you can salvage the data. This is not for making the disk a working disk again, just data recovery. Now for the biggie, the disk not recognized. Question, does the drive spin up and reset itself? Put your finger on a known good drive and feel it when you turn it on. Chnces are you can feel the vibrations as the disk spindle starts to spin and the heads seek a reference "home" position. If you feel the same pattern of vibrations from the bad disk, chances are it is simply not responding to the operating system high level commands. The data recovery programs may still be able to use brute force to read the data. Try it, you've nothing to lose. Next, nothing worked with the above. Do you have an identical drive? You might try swapping the circuit boards. This ONLY works with an EXACT IDENTICAL drive. The PCB has a ROM with parameters for the drive and obviously a different kind of drive will have different parameters. Same model drive, same ROM parameters. Sometimes this will make the failed drive respond since something failed on the PCB, not in the mechanical part of the drive. It's worth a shot. Next, the drive that gets dropped while running, in a laptop for example, or your girlfriend/lover gets a bit energetic and while attempting to get some traction, kicks the computer off the kitchen table which you both are using for an alternate form of entertainment. Ah, hem... This kind of failure is usually catastrophic and fatal in that the heads have made physical contact with the disk surface and scraped off the magnetic coating on the disk. If the heads were not damaged and are still clean, you may be able to brute force all but the actual physically damaged portions. Or, worst case, the heads are damaged and nothing is going to work. Ontrack Systems can recover data, even from a failure such as this, by removing the media, the disk spindle, and putting the disks into another drive and then using the brute force method, which can get to be VERY, VERY expensive.

I have used the swap out of circuit boards to recover. Some soda got spilled on the circuit board unknown to me while I had the case open. (Thank you, visiting friend of my son, for shaking the can and spraying soda all over...) I shouldn't have had it open on the kitchen table anyway. Turning it on later fried the drive electronics. Swapping the PCB allowed me to recover the data. Lucky me, I had 4 identical drives, and 1 was a shelf spare. I swapped the PCB, capied the data to backup tapes, swapped back and put in the shelf spare and recovered from the backup tape. I got lucky. I was meaning to get a bigger drive for the shelf spares anyway.

I have used Spinwrite from Gibson Research to "refresh" the format on several older drives and recovered sectors previously marked as bad.

I used recovery software from Ontrack Systems to read data from 4 drives which became unreadable after a lightning strike last year. Fortunately, the drives would spin up and reset, which I determined from the finger on the drive method. It took several days of crunching per partition per drive. All told, it took me 8 weeks to recover the data from all 4 drives. The drives, however, could not be made into working drives since these were the type which could not be physically low level formatted in the field. It was cheaper to replace than to repair these.

There is it, the answer: "yes and no," and "it dpends."

Answer 3

If the drive is not physically broken, your data can be recovered and you can still use the drive. First, buy a new drive and install Operating System on it. Purchase software, "Restorer2000",
cost $30.00.

When your system is up and running, connect the bad drive.
start restorer2000 and follow instructions on the screen.

If you need more help, send me your e-mail address and I will
provide you with detailed instructions. Do not through away your hard drive. do not try to use it right now.

Answer 4

from your example, no. But if somehow the actual data disks are undamaged, then the mechanical components could be replaced the the drive usable again. Though I don't know of anyone actaully doing this

Answer 5

I would have to say no if your O.S. dont recognize it. If it has to many bad sectors it is useless bc they will become surface errors and you dont want that.

Answer 6

sometimes it works...most of the time it doesn't....kinda of a crapshoot depending on the amount of damage and nature of the damage.