Comment on HDD data recovery
remotelove@lemmy.ca 6 days agoIt was on old 3.5" drives a long time ago, before anything fancy was ever built into the drives. It was in a seriously rough working environment anyway, so we saw a lot of failed drives. If strange experiments didn’t work to get the things working, mainly for lulz, the next option was to see if a sledge hammer would fix the problem. Funny thing… that never worked either.
XTL@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
I’ve once had a hard drive of some particular vintage that wasn’t able to start. I did get it running with a hammer tap. Got the remains of data out and replaced the drive. It was nothing special, a Unix system drive with nothing that wasn’t on tape, but I just had to see if I could fix a hard drive with a hammer.
I also remember one admin who would often be seen walking between computer maintenance room and workshop wing with drives and a blacksmiths hammer labelled “format”.