Found more rare earth magnets

[lago]

I had a HD failure in my desktop PC a few weeks ago. Somehow, the MBR was corrupted. I installed a new HD and thanks to Win7 backup, I was able to restore the system and all data that was only 3 days old.

Yesterday, I installed the old HD in a external case and the system is unable to even recognize the HD. I even installed it back in the PC and used the system repair disk to boot and again, couldn't recognize the HD.

Looks like I have some more rare earth magnets. Also, looked thru the cabinet and came across several 40gig and 60gig drives that are not longer used. These magnets sure come in handy around the shop.

Lago

[cabinetman]

Can you post some pictures?

.

[phrog]

I had a HD failure in my desktop PC a few weeks ago. Somehow, the MBR was corrupted. I installed a new HD and thanks to Win7 backup, I was able to restore the system and all data that was only 3 days old.

Yesterday, I installed the old HD in a external case and the system is unable to even recognize the HD. I even installed it back in the PC and used the system repair disk to boot and again, couldn't recognize the HD.

Looks like I have some more rare earth magnets. Also, looked thru the cabinet and came across several 40gig and 60gig drives that are not longer used. These magnets sure come in handy around the shop.

Lago

I've often wondered if you could "transplant" the platters into another drive (after removing one of the receiver's platters) and, thereby, read the old ones.

[lago]

Here is a pic of some that I have already removed. The magnet is glued to a piece of metal. I once tried to remove it but the magnet broke off. It was still usable but not the size that I wanted.

[BigguyZ]

I've had some nasty pinches from HDD magnets. Those are rediculously strong...

[DLyon]

I've often wondered if you could "transplant" the platters into another drive (after removing one of the receiver's platters) and, thereby, read the old ones.

This can be done. You need to find an identical drive and take care not to scratch the platters.

[ironhat]

Are you able to cut permanent magnets with a metal-cutting bandsaw to make them more manageable in size and strength?

[gerti]

This can be done. You need to find an identical drive and take care not to scratch the platters.

Hmm... Always thought you need a cleanroom for this.

[LCHIEN]

I've often wondered if you could "transplant" the platters into another drive (after removing one of the receiver's platters) and, thereby, read the old ones.

Nearly impossible.
First and most importantly, drives are assembled in clean room conditions . THe data head that reads data flies literally micro-inches off the surface of the disk. The platters must be pristinely clean or the head will be crashing into dust particles that look like randomly placed shopping carts when you're driving in the parking lot at 50 mph. You could not open and disassemble a drive and keep it clean enough.

Then there's a whole thing about reading - you'd need the same model drive because of the track spacing and marking and count would need to be consistent. Also the data directory pointers are on one platter and the data is on the other, you could not do just one platter. The tracks are very tiny and narrow so that precision is required for the head to track the tracks is very high.

Probably about .0000000001% chance of working.

[mpc]

I've often wondered if you could "transplant" the platters into another drive (after removing one of the receiver's platters) and, thereby, read the old ones.

That's basically one technique used by data recovery centers. They have to have, or buy, a drive identical to the dead customer's drive and transplant sub-assemblies until the drive functions. That's assuming the problem wasn't physical corruption of the magnetic surfaces and/or corruption of the logical filesystem structure (i.e. erasing the directory). For cases where the filesystem structure is damaged data can still be recovered by brute-force reading each sector of the hard drive. You end up with sector or cluster sized chunks of your files... all mixed up. And many times many older versions of the file from areas that are marked "free" but haven't yet been over-written on the drive. The more often you defragment the easier it'd be to piece together the files.

A corrupt MBR makes the drive unrecognizable to the Windows filesystem - the drive acts like it's never been formatted. From a repair/recovery prompt (available by booting the original Windows installation DVD) there are various commands that can be tried depending on the version of Windows:
fdisk /mbr (old Windows)
fixmbr \Device\HardDisk0 XP Pro, maybe other XP versions
bootrec /fixmbr followed by bootrec /fixboot if needed For Vista/Win7

Do this when only the bad hard disk is physically plugged into the computer so there's no chance of corrupting a working disk (including SSD drives)

Another thing that can make the MBR read nonsense is an incorrect entry in the computer's BIOS settings for the drive. For the last few years everything has been auto-detected to get the number of cylinders, heads, and sectors per track info for IDE/PATA drives and to auto-detect info for SATA drives. If the numeric fields are incorrect, the physical layout of the formatted hard drive won't line up with what the BIOS nor Windows expects so you get gibberish from the drive.

mpc

[twistsol]

Hmm... Always thought you need a cleanroom for this.

You definitely need a clean room for this unless you are truly desperate to recover data quickly. Once you unseal a drive, it's lifespan is dramatically reduced and you've basically reduced both drives to scrap. I successfully did this once a couple of decades ago but I don't know if it's even possible with modern drives anymore.

[phrog]

Hmm... Always thought you need a cleanroom for this.

I have a clean room.

From all the responses in this thread, it sounds that you'all think it is nearly impossible to transplant platters successfully.
Guess I'll just go back to collecting magnets.