Originally Posted by DrSeuss

the only person I know that fixed his hard drive, did it by filling his bathroom with steam from a very very hot shower. Then letting it settle, before attempting to fix the drive. He did the fixing wearing a hair net and a non-woven cloth suit. The steam takes all of the dust out of the air. Pretty sure he also hoovered first, to get rid of any dust.

You could also see if you can get access to a university clean room. But that seems unlikely.

Originally Posted by Jorsher

GET THIS ----------ING ----!!!

This morning, I get paid, and decide to treat myself with a 1tb Seagate hard-drive.

Then, just an hour or two ago, I notice uTorrent says "disk overload." Wasn't too big of a deal because sometimes when I'm reading from the drive, it can't keep up with what uTorrent is trying to write. ---- was still going on an hour later. Hard-drive was spinning but I wasn't seeing any read/write action. Tried to go to My Computer to see if it was appearing, and My Computer froze, so I knew it was "waiting" for the drive to become available. So, I go to shut the computer down so I can power off the hard-drive.

Windows takes forever to shut down. Gives me errors that it was unable to write to the files I was downloading on bittorrent. Bad news. Drive was still spinning.

Forced the computer to turn off, and turned off the drive. Powered both back on and now it doesn't appear in My Computer. ----. Listen to the hard-drive, no spinning but I hear a constant "click click click."

Now if it was a drive full of ---- I downloaded, I really wouldn't care. Being that it's a drive full of ALL my pictures, documents, ebooks, 50gb of music, roms, etc etc etc...all the ---- I want to keep during a format, I'M VERY ----------ING PISSED. I never heard any scraping or grinding, so I'm hoping either the logic board failed, or in a better situation the head is just stuck.

I have two options here:
1. Open the drive and risk contamination, but possibly "unstick" the head so it'll work and I can retrieve the data
2. Pay a company hundreds of dollars to attempt to fix it

I really want to try the first option because it's free and I think the head is just stuck, but a ------- particle of dust can make it permanently unrecoverable. Here's an image to give you an idea of how small the gap is:

That is supposedly an old picture and newer high capacity drives have even smaller gaps than that.



---- YOU SAMSUNG! NEVER AGAIN!

Originally Posted by spikederailed

I have had the freezer trick help me recover data off a failing/failed hdd before.