Crazy case: WD Passport with lightning damage

[pcn]

Hi all,

I just had a crazy case with lightning damage that was driving me nuts. Drive looks like:





First I read ROM in external reader and burned it on a compatible pcb. The drive was checked in our lab and inside it looked great except the molten filter that was replaced. With new PCB attached the drive clicked and spindown. So preamp is gone too. Heads replaced in lab with perferct donor heads. After that the drive starts and can read SA. When DIR and loader is loaded a backup was taken and SED removed, heads could write. On soft-reset the drive IDs but starts to produce some seeking noise. But any sector access fails with ARB :evil:

SA was ok, no damaged modules. So I but heads back in donor and they worked fine. Hmmm :? Hmmm :roll: So a second headswap, fine heads, perfect match and guess what, same problem :evil:

As last resort I did a platter swap, kept the donor heads, took the magnets from donor, filter from donor, delimer from donor, in short: everything from donor except platters

That finally helped to get the drive back to life. So the lighning must have damaged the motor in a way that the drive spins but in a way that user data access was not possible anymore.

Final thoughts: If nothing else helps, a platter swap might.

Anyone else had a similar case like that?

 

[Jared]

Nice work PCN (sorry, I don't recall your real name).

I had one case where a computer was hit by lightning years ago cooking the PCB and heads of all the drives. They were all recovered except for one WD Velociraptor that even after several head swaps never would work right. Maybe i'll have to revisit that case and try a platter swap. I think the customer is still around.

 

[LarrySabo]

Nice work, Martin. I've not had anything close, fortunately, but will keep your suggestion in mind. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Sam]

Nice logical diagnosis--you've got to figure that anything electrical might have been damaged.

 

[pcn]

Thank you all for your replies, these are the cases that make data recovery a interesting challange, no case is the same and you often have to puzzle to succeed :mrgreen:

@Jared: Larry is right, my name is Martin Platter swap on a Velociraptor? Did it suffer overvoltage, lightning damage or a drop? I mean if you tried everything elese before and nothing worked, why not. There is always a chance that unusual things happened and an unusual approach will succeed. So good look!

 

[Jared]

[post]10794[/post] @Jared: Larry is right, my name is Martin Platter swap on a Velociraptor? Did it suffer overvoltage, lightning damage or a drop? I mean if you tried everything elese before and nothing worked, why not. There is always a chance that unusual things happened and an unusual approach will succeed. So good look!

Yeah, it was definitely lightning damage. Everything in the computer was fried, all the drives toast. We did several recoveries, and the one that we couldn't seem to get recovered was the least important to the customer, so they were happy once the other drives were recovered. Just would have been some extra coin in my pocket if we could have figured it out. We tried everything short of a platter swap because there seemed to be no need since the motor spun up just fine and everything seemed normal there. With each set of heads we tried, we were even able to read the SA but user data was always like 95% error sectors and only a few sectors would actually read. I had finally concluded that the electricity must have polarized the drive enough to just tweak the data beyond recovery.

Perhaps in your case and mine the issue just related to a winding pulling too much current and causing a malfunction. I'll have to look the customer back up and see if they still want the drive recovered. I actually still remember his name since it was such an interesting case. Might be worth trying.