[Coco] Drive freezing / data reovery (WAS: Re: Need to know if I'm in safe waters here)

[Jim Hickle]

Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote: Manny wrote:
> Brian Blake wrote:
>> I'm still partial to 'platter swapping' in these events. Of courseyou
>> have to have an almost identical drive to make it work, but, that
>> takes the other issues out of the equation. Of course it adds other
>> issues, but, if the goal is recovery of data, this option has worked
>> for me everytime on drives where the spindle or head assembly quit
>> working, and I've had a similar drive to the one that died...
>>
>> Another CoCo thread gone OT...
>
> I think platter swapping is a better alternative, as well. It's
> probably more fun, too. ;)
>
Well, since I don't have a clean room I'd probably usually prefer to
take my chances with freezing the drive and keeping the disks inside. 
The whole idea is to try to rescue the data.  The rest of the drive is
already condemned.  If I open the case and contaminate the platters,
which seems extremely likely to me, I have permanently ruined the data I
was after.  Freezing the drive _could_ result in condensation inside the
disk enclosure, but I feel less certain that it would destroy the data
than would the process of opening the case and swapping platters.  Maybe
I'm just more clumsy and filthy than everybody else.  :-)

I have wondered how hard it would be to make a clean box -- why should
we need an entire room?  And I once did open up an old MFM drive and
bent a head arm from which the head had fallen off out of the way.  The
drive then formatted to 32 instead of 40M and worked for quite some
time.  I simply told the low level formatting routine it had one fewer
heads, which was now true.

I guess if I tried the freezing trick, and it didn't work, and I had an
appropriate donor drive that I didn't mind sacrificing in order to get
the data back, I guess I would try swapping platters.

But without having an identical drive, swapping platters is an exercise
in futility.  However, most people do have access to a freezer.
> But, it needs to be said that Briza's HDD problem stemmed from a bad
> IDE cable and the corruption resulting from it. This cannot be fixed
> no matter how many times you try to freeze or swap the platters in a HDD.
>
Indeed, it has been said, in my previous post.  I agree that his problem
doesn't sound like it would be helped by freezing or swapping platters.
> What should be done, in my opinion (and with what I know being half
> the world away), is that the HDD should be hooked back up, and the
> information taken from it. Then a good format. Hopefully none of the
> information that we crave has been damaged in the corruption from the
> IDE cable. Of course, someone a little closer to Briza, preferably in
> the same country as he is in, should probably give him a visit and
> help him out with the problem first hand. :)
>
Yup.

JCE
> -M.
>
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>


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