On 2020-09-30 10:55, Mark (Netbook) wrote:
Since you have taken the disk apart it will now be useless as within the
enclosure there could have been a vacuum or an inert gas.
No, old drives were filled with air usually, and were connected to
exterior atmosphere via porous barrier. That is why regular drives are
much more likely to fail up in the mountains, say where the is about 1/2
of normal atmospheric pressure. Pressure inside ordinary drive is the
same as external pressure, and heads are just spring loaded and are
resting on platter surface, and are pushed away from it when platters
spin (hence so called "parking track" ). Air works as viscous liquid at
these relative speeds, and the law is at least cubic, so at 1/2
atmosphere heads are much closer to platter surface. Therefore, failures
are quite likely. Sealed drives are still not wide spread, He (helium)
filled would be one type. But sealed drives existed even some 25+ years
ago (to be used at Astronomy observatories high in mountains, e.g.). I
remember HP drives of that kind that costed $10k apiece back then, and
those dollars, not today's dollars.
What you are right about is: the drive upon opening got contaminated
with solid dust particles, and will not serve long. But fair chance is,
one still will be able to get data off it.
You will never be able to recover any data on the disk unless you go and
pay for a professional data recovery organisation to read the platters.
While he may be able to recover data, professional recovery are more
likely to succeed. They will be not happy to work with drive that was
opened not in a "clean room", and my charge more. Be it I, I definitely
will tell them that drive was opened not in clean room, they will know
anyway once they have drive.
Valeri
The price for a replacement 340GByte USB disk is about $25 which would
give you a better product than your old disk.
Mark
-----Original Message----- From: H
Sent: Wednesday, September 30, 2020 4:47 PM
To: centos@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: External harddisk
On 09/30/2020 05:40 AM, John Pierce wrote:
On Tue, Sep 29, 2020, 8:33 AM H <agents@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have an old external harddisk, Toshiba 320 Gb, with a USB connector
that
I wanted to check for contents. It did not start up when connected and I
could not hear the motor spinning. After leaving it in the freezer
overnight the motor spins but it is not recognized by my computer. I
disassembled it and could see that the head assembly rests outside
the disk
but when it is powered on, the head first moves to the center of the
disk,
then to the periphery and finally back to the resting position. This
happens every few seconds and leaving it connected overnight changed
nothing.
That repeated seeking suggests it's not passing its self test, and is
constantly retrying. It's probably searching for servo data on the
disks,
and not finding it.
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I see. I have not searched for any low-level disk utility from Toshiba,
the manufacturer of the disk. Do you think that might be worthwhile to
hopefully fix this?
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--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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