exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I have an old Conner 80MB HDD which was shelved for about 5 years and recently I have decided to get some old stuff from it. When I connected it to the PC it was making strange noise something close to header clicking. I have read that try to bang side of it against some wood so I have did that but no luck. Then I have decided to open it to see what is going on and it came up that the header is stuck so I have put some pressure to let it go when rotating disks.

That let help to recognize that disk in WinUAE and load WB (with 2 errors) but then I was not able to copy what I was looking for. When I try to dump to hard drive file it will go to 59% or 74% and then will do that jumping header to the center (park?) and then back out with stopping spinning disks and will restart to read till WinUAE will error out.

Here is a video of that problem:

Any thought on what can be wrong and if it possible to restore anything from that HDD?

You tried the 'bang the HDD against some wood' technique and it didn't work? That's really odd. The only other thing I can think of is trying the 'turn upside down, drop it and see if it lands on its feet' technique. Worth a shot.

Steve wrote: 11 Jan 2021 02:05 You tried the 'bang the HDD against some wood' technique and it didn't work? That's really odd.

I would check to see if the drive is a self parking model first. If it is not and taping is is not a good idea until you know the head is parked. Taping it with the head out can cause the head to hit the media. I would look to run spinworks on it if you can

Tom

Quickly rotating the drive in the plane of the disk is safer for stiction issues anyway.

If data is that important send it to a recovery company.. Though not sure they could help with retro formats.. Or get a working drive and swap the platter, but will likely cause damage if you touch the data area..but nothing I have tried before so can't say it will work. It may not but you not got many options..looks like it can't find track 0 , I would guess the heads are damaged or out of alignment.. Or the data has simply "faded away"..

Also banging the drive about isn't a good idea. If the heads are not parked they hit the platter causing damage. The heads are fragile to start with, with fine tollerences..That video I couldn't watch, the guy is constantly touching the thing..you don't ever open drives.. Moisture in the air will start to corrode the platter.. They are air tight sealed for a reason.

If you're going to tap the drive, only ever do it on the edge, with the drive on it's side to reduce the risk of crashing the head onto the platter. I have also found with this method, sometimes having power on will help release the heads, especially if self parking.

However, I would never recommend removing the drive cover as you've done, because you've introduced dust into a system that relies on a very small gap between the heads and the platters. In a clean room, that's fine, but in a general environment, you could introduce particles large enough to get between the heads and platter, which can lead to all sorts of problems. As exxos said, you're also introducing moisture too, and if you happen to touch the platters, the oils from your skin will cause corrosion.

Tomswork wrote: 11 Jan 2021 06:29 I would check to see if the drive is a self parking model first. If it is not and taping is is not a good idea until you know the head is parked. Taping it with the head out can cause the head to hit the media. I would look to run spinworks on it if you can

Tom

Yes, it was stuck in a self parking mode.

exxos wrote: 11 Jan 2021 08:59 It may not but you not got many options..looks like it can't find track 0 , I would guess the heads are damaged or out of alignment.. Or the data has simply "faded away"..

That what I have though - it looks like can't find a sector or a track. Header goes to some point then will park and restart disks to spin. No clue if that can be fixed (marked as a bad-block?) or not. WinUAE dump to hard disk file requires full disk working. Probably I will end up to copy files/folders one by one if there is no solution to get first issue solved.

JackTheKnife wrote: 11 Jan 2021 13:53 That what I have though - it looks like can't find a sector or a track. Header goes to some point then will park and restart disks to spin. No clue if that can be fixed (marked as a bad-block?) or not. WinUAE dump to hard disk file requires full disk working. Probably I will end up to copy files/folders one by one if there is no solution to get first issue solved.

Other than copying off what you can, if you really want the data off it, you need a proper recovery company.. maybe they could do a drive image so you can restore it on a new drive.

Heads bouncing like that is a track not found. Mostly such faults are mechanical faults as the tolerances are very tight. Its same problem on floppy drives and HDD's are tighter packed. Once the head gets to some point on the disk ,it cant go any further and resets.. If the files you copy are say on the outer edge of the disk, and it fails on everything towards the center, then its likely a alignment issue.. but the media could well be bad, but you should in theory be able to get past the bad part and read random files across the disk if that's the case.