[wplug] recovering data from failed scsi device?

[Vanco, Don]

For whatever reason I never saw the original post on this thread......

If there has not been a head crash (i.e. your drive now sounds like a
maraca) you can also try changing the controller board between to
similar drives.  This has saved me on several occasions.

I have never tried the refrigerator trick but might be worth a shot.
FWIW I lived through the "bad bearing days" of Seagate 2, 4 and 6GB SCSI
drives in early 93 (hey - those were HUGE drives then) and once those
bearings were dead (seized) they were dead.  If you're not familiar with
the story, at whatever Seagate factory that built these drives someone
mis-marked a crate of "low speed" bearings as "high speed" bearings -
there were 100s of thousands of failures of "high speed" drives (and
likely as many "low speed" drives that lived far beyond their expected
MTBF).  At one point in time I saw about a 50-60% failure rate - I would
ship a dozen drives back for warranty replacement per week.  At that
time there weren't a lot of alternatives... we ended up buying a much
more expensive Seagate "media drive" (had more cache) just to keep our
product shipping.

I think someone mentioned swapping the actual platters between devices -
I would like to see that if you are not armed with a bevy of specialty
tools - especially if the heads park near the spindle or somewhere on
the disks.  I have lots of office paperweights and fobs from attempting
this type of activity..  I have never been able to
disassemble/reassemble a head motor without annihilating it.

Failing that, if the data is that critical there are recovery shops
(like http://www.ontrack.com/) that can rip the drive apart and recover
it for a per MB cost.  It will not be cheap.

Check out the attached - that's a 17" monitor in the background.  Any
guesses on the capacity?  It got dusty here in my cube - so I tried to
clean it with Windex - it stripped the media layer right off!

Good luck -
Don


>-----Original Message-----
>From: wplug-bounces+don.vanco=agilysys.com at wplug.org 
>[mailto:wplug-bounces+don.vanco=agilysys.com at wplug.org] On 
>Behalf Of techmike
>Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 10:55 AM
>To: wplug at wplug.org
>Subject: Re: [wplug] recovering data from failed scsi device?
>
>
>How has the drive failed?  Most of mine that fail cease to spin up..
>
>If thats the case, stick the drive in a gallon ziplock bag, get all the
>air you can out and stick it in the freezer overnight.
>
>With the drive still cold, power it up and see if it spins..  Sometimes
>will buy you a few hours to back it up..
>
>-Mike
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: "Matthew T. Engel" <mengel at allegheny.edu>
>To: wplug at wplug.org
>Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 09:47:52 -0400
>Subject: [wplug] recovering data from failed scsi device?
>
>> Does anyone know how I might go about recovering data from a failed
>> scsi
>> drive?  Or at least point me in a direction of a good resource?
>> 
>> thanks in advance...
>> 
>> Matt Engel
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