 And my goal here is not to teach you how to fix the hard drive so you can put it back in your computer and make it work again. Now hard drives are cheap. If you can repair the hard drive, get the data off of it as quick as possible, then you don't need that hard drive again and you just throw it in the garbage or do whatever you've got to do. So let's find out for real if this is going to work. Alright. A little bit about my presentation. It is all done in flash. So PowerPoint was not hurt. Thank you. We did not harm PowerPoint making this. So on the CD, you will find the Swift file. You can drag and drop into any browser and you can play it. You can also go to forensicspeak.com and I have it up live with a couple of spelling errors fixed. So one of the things that I want to describe to you is some of the common things that you might not know about a hard drive rather than the things that people always seem to say. I was at a drinking contest a couple of days ago and a guy sitting next to me who is a high-end tech said, you can't do that because those hard drives are hermetically sealed. How many people think a hard drive is hermetically sealed? No? How many people think it is sealed at all? Oh, look, a couple of hands. Well, if it was hermetically sealed, it means that there would be no air transfer from the inside of that hard drive to the outside. And that just absolutely isn't true. Every hard drive, there are hermetically sealed hard drives. Let me just state that the DoD or somebody who is flying in an airplane very high would have to have a hermetically sealed because when the air gets so thin, the air will not support a head floating in the air. So the hard drives that you buy at the store are not sealed at all. They have a little hole, a filter sometimes in the top and sometimes there's some underneath the platters themselves to try to help equalize the pressure as you turn on that hard drive and get it running. Usually, let's see if this works, usually it's in a gap in an area over here and it's sometimes on the lid of the hard drive that you will see this hole. There also is sometimes a spacer in the back and there will be a hole for the air to come in and a small filter that looks like a pillow sitting there. Now the first thing I can tell you about a data recovery is if you did happen to open this drive and look at it. If you look at that filter first, you may save yourself a lot of time and a lot of energy because if it is silver when you open it, it means that the head was scraping the platters somewhere and little fragments flew off and went into this filter. Why that is important is because you cannot always see where the scratch is on your platters because you cannot take off a multi-platter system. There might be a scratch on the bottom of a platter and you can't see it where the head hit it. The only way you know it is there is to look at this little pillow to see if it has any silver oxide on it at all. I'm going to go through this component as a separate component but the two components that I don't really cover in any other slides is this thing here called the actuator lock and the spindle. Now the spindle is the motor. I don't mean that it's like that, you know, 59 cent thing that you bought at Radio Shack and you attach to a little pin. Underneath the cover after you take off this first piece, there's a silver cap and underneath the silver cap is actually the part of the motor that has the coils wrapped around it that helps it spin. And in there, at least all modern hard drives would have some fluid bearings to help it spin. So if something bad happens to that motor, that motor is actually mounted in most cases physically on the chassis that the hard drive is in. So because one of the other questions I get all the time is, well what happens if my motor goes back and I just pop that motor out and put another motor in? Well obviously if it's mounted there, you've got to go through the platters and everything else before you can get that far. The other thing is with this actuator lock right here, it is nothing but a thin piece of plastic and it is sitting on a pin. And what happens when a hard drive starts up is power is applied to the board itself and then power is applied to the motor. The motor starts to spin the platters. The platters will create something called an air bearing. There is just enough air to cause the end of the head of the hard drive to start floating in the air. Well before that happens, if your head was not locked in some fashion, it would just slide back and forth across the platter all the time, thereby scratching your platter and damaging it. So they came up with this very simplistic method of air flow as the air bearing starts to spin and the air is starting to be created. All it does is it just causes the little piece of plastic to teeter back and forth. And it comes out of the rock position. At that time hopefully the head is floating in the air and it won't scratch the platter. So that's a preventative measurement. Just a note, most people think that it might not be too important, but you do need that lock back in place if you happen to disassemble your hard drive and try to put it back and try to keep it running again. If you don't, there's a chance that the head's going to go too far one way or too far another way before it actually locks. And that would be bad news even in a data recovery. I'm going to go break down the rest of these components now. The integrated board on the bottom is probably the most important piece of this whole thing. It does a lot of things that most people don't realize are actually happening. How many people think that they have a hard drive in their laptop right now that does not have any errors on it? Well, a lot of faith in their hard drives. Your hard drive in the normal use of itself has errors all day long. Even while you're using it and it's a good hard drive, it has errors in its normal cycle. It has gotten to the point where because the hard drives are so fast and there's so much data passing through it, they don't even bother to try to get a hard drive that doesn't have errors anymore. What they do instead is they use ECC, an error correction code, and they embed that in the drive when it's writing the data. So if it's coming along and it's reading the data off your hard drive and it runs in, wow, these video problems, aren't they great? We have audio. Just hit cancel on that. I don't need it, cancel. If you have what? What about Windows? Well, I think all OSes have their own issues. So that is one of the major topics I'm not going to go in because I don't want to battle up here on what OS is best. I actually use all of them to do a data recovery and you'll see why when I get to one of the further slides. I break it down, but sure, Windows makes it scream. So there is a chip and a component on here that tracks your ECC errors as it's reading off the drive. If the ECC detects a problem, it tries to do what it can to repair the problem on the fly and they don't even count that as an error. It never even gets seen anywhere. Next time it gets overwritten and data comes, it's just going to keep going and it will retry a certain number of times as well. So when the head passes by that piece of the hard drive and it reads the data, it will retry before, you know, whatever the manufacturer set a number to before it will even mark it as a bad sector on the hard drive. So that's very common that every hard drive is going to have those kind of problems. So the chips are the most important thing here is the firmware. From one manufacturer to another, you may have some changes just even within a week or two week cycle. In this particular case, this is an IBM hard drive. The chassis and all the platters and everything are made at one particular manufacturer, but you may have your board manufactured at two completely different places. So one week it may be made in Korea and the next week it may be made in China. And as you can see with these two boards, it's the exact same hard drive. They changed the model number and they changed the manufacturer date. If you notice every hard drive has that date on it. Well, this is one of the reasons why. If they don't know when it was made, they don't know which firmware they used. So in this particular case, you can see that the chips are in different places for the same hard drive. That becomes really important in doing data recoveries because if I get a hard drive that came from 2001 and it was made May 1st, 2001, dude, man. Okay, so if it was made in 2001 and I want to do a recovery on this drive, I need to try to find the most likely drive that's going to match that to start doing some part swapping or to change that board. If the firmware is not exactly the same, it's not going to work. The two drives are conditioned to work with whatever components are in the drive at the time and they are low level formatted by the manufacturer at that time to work only with those boards. So if you swap them, they will actually work on the hard drive, but you won't ever be able to read your data back because they have to be low level formatted and go through that whole process again. So if you want to, what you need to do is find a hard drive. I can go usually as much as two months out. So whatever day it was made, I either subtract or add two months and usually I'm pretty safe. I try to get it as close to two weeks as possible so that I can get the most likely drive that's going to match this part. If something goes bad with the drive and you've got to change this out, it's really easy, there are no components on these boards that are actually like soldered to the drive or wired to it in any way. It's four screws, take four screws off, pop it off and there's a little contact. So this is going to be one of the items that you're going to have to find to solve most of the problems. So now let's disassemble the hard drive and look at all the internal parts. This component right here, we're going to go through as one solid piece. Even though technically it's made separately, the heads are mounted together in a sequence, they cannot move and the logic board that goes with it is typically wired directly to this little green string that goes down the arm of the hard drive. So we're going to treat those as one component. In the old days when you would have, anybody have an MFM hard drive? You remember you could low level format those things? And then IDE came along and there was no low level format anymore. The heads somewhat would guess where they needed to go because they used a stepping motor before 1986. And in 1986, Connor released one of the first ones that used something called the voice coil. So the big change between this is that the data that was written to the drive had this server info, the alignment info. So written in a little space that you cannot read with your equipment at all. There is some servo info, which is geographical information about where your data exists in those sectors on the hard drive, so that at all points in time the head is reading that data, sending it back to the electronics and telling it where the head is on the platter at all times. You can't read that data at all. And this is one of the reasons why you can't do a low level format anymore is because they use a special machine to do the low level format and write the servo information into it called a servo writer, which is very expensive and we don't have one. So anybody can think of what happens when you have multiple platters in a hard drive? If you took out the platters and tried to put them back in? The heads are aligned, they knew that they were going to move as one solid piece and so all the servo information fits in a pie slice in a cylinder. So if you move that, even a micro inch, it is not going to be able to read that data because the geographic information will no longer be there and it will no longer be correct. So that's the other question I get all the time is, oh, if my hard drive is dead and these heads are such a pain to replace, why can't I just pop out these platters and move them over to another drive? Well, here's the key on the top of the drive that I showed earlier. There's one screw, sometimes there's a couple of screws. If there's more than one platter, they spin freely. There is nothing in between them except the little locking ring and once you unscrew it, the two platters will spin independently and you will never be able to get them to align again at all, period. So the hint here is we're not going to be moving platters from one drive to another if there's more than one. So let's go into the head a little bit. Most of the technology that we use is actually extremely old. Almost everything that we do was invented by IBM and most of it happened before 1950-1956. The first hard drive that came out was released by IBM in 1956 and they used a magnetic oxide, an iron oxide. Anybody know the other name for iron oxide? Rust. And it's very soft on their platters. In 1956, the heads actually touched the platter. They had a lot of wear on those platters and in order to get five megs, you would have to have 50, 24-inch platters in order to get five megs. So you've got heads scratching these platters all day long. So they had to come up with another method to make these things work. Originally, there was a slider at the end on the tip of this head. There still is a slider but they call it a pico slider now because its original function was to kind of work like a railroad with two rails on each side and the head reading the data in the middle so that the head could be suspended enough that it could read that data. Today, since it floats, we don't have to worry about that so it needs to be small enough just to mount the information, the pieces on it so that it will be light enough to float in the air. But they discovered because of that wear that they needed to do this and an engineer figured this out and released a hard drive in 1963 that the heads actually floated and that's called the fly height. He says it's kind of like vinyl. It's not really like vinyl at all because on a vinyl on a record, right, you're reading the magnetic information off of it. There's no laser yet. They're actually working on that. Right, one touches, the other one doesn't. So the arm of the hard drive is actually manufactured in such a way that wind resistance is what helps it float. That's why it looks a lot like the wing of an airplane. Everything on that arm is optimized for speed to try to keep that thing floating in the air where all the holes are cut and everything and that includes the triangle piece down here that was cut that way so that it would have strong rigidity but still be light and able to be lifted off. But we're going to go into how the voice coil works since we've got every hard drive uses a voice coil today. Basically at the end of this area here the voice coil uses resistance like the speaker does. When you supply energy to the voice coil, it causes it to move back and forth in very small areas. So that's why they needed the servo information so that they could try to track where the head was because with a stepping motor it would move in certain increments but with a voice coil it doesn't move in those increments at all so they supply small amounts of energy so that it can move in small increments and then find out where the head is so it can go and read the data. Now today almost all the platters are made with aluminum or glass. Now there's some advantages to using glass. One of the things with glass is that it's smoother than aluminum. It doesn't expand as much when it's heated and they can do a number of different things with it to make it spin faster because the same amount of glass that would weigh the same amount as aluminum is more rigid so they can make the platters thinner. If they can make them thinner they weigh less and they can spin faster. So over the years it has increased the speed of the ability for us to read data from this hard drive. The airflow that causes the head to float in the air that is one of the big things that may possibly change shortly. The head of the hard drive right now flies at two one millionths of an inch off of the top of that platter. And just to give you some idea, hair, your thin hair is two thousandths the size of that. It is twice, it is two thousand times the size of where this is over the platter. Now Seagate just came out with some different ideas about trying to move the head of this platter closer so that they can read more information off of it to affect density so we can get more data off of it. This is where this comes into play. Right now currently all of the hard drives that we use with the exception of two or three that have come out in the last year and one of those is that 750 gig Seagate hard drive does not use this particular method of recording but for 50 years we've used long intudinal recording where there is a north and south pole and the data that's written to the hard drive is written in one direction and the other direction is basically ignored so any time that the head picks up traffic going over that it will detect that as one bit and it will read that information and put it back out there. Now there's been a major change in the head. The head itself, this was done for simplistic reasons to make it look like this. On the website that I told you earlier at ForensicsSpeak.com there is a link to what IBM has made that is the new GMR head of the platters itself and the head has changed quite a bit and they use a type of metal now that they glue together that can read differences and magnetic information as it passes under it and it's very complicated. So this piece was done for simplicity to give you an idea of how this data is written back and forth. Now as time has gone on they needed to write more data to the drive so any drives that have been larger than 16 gigs have started to use this new head so that they can write more and more data to it. Now for those of you who can't see that those are flipping bits so the bits themselves as you are writing and the aerial density increases they started having problems reading more and more data from it to the point that the ECC on the board didn't even help to be able to correct errors so they'll have bits at different places that will flip just because of the environmental items that are going on around it. So there's been this big push to try to go to a new type of recording mechanism so this last year we've gone to the perpendicular recording they decided if we didn't have enough space to increase that we could write the data up and down instead and that we could read that bit and store more bits in the same amount of space so that's how Seagate came out with that 750 gig hard drive. Now this new technology that they patented the day that I released this particular presentation is called Hammer, H-A-M-R and it's heat assisted magnetic recording and as the head goes across the platter in this new technology it zaps it with a laser which causes the lubrication on the top of the drive to evaporate and they came up with this new idea that they can use a reservoir inside the hard drive and make a vapor and have it go back to the hard drive's platters to get lubrication back on the drive's platters while it's running. I don't know about you guys but that sounds like a pretty bad idea to me. I'm thinking that as they increase this that this reservoir that they claim is going to live the life of the hard drive. I don't know what life of hard drive means to them and thinking legal terms it means seven years but in this particular instance I'm thinking warranty because coincidentally the same time that they released this new information they started their own data recovery company. Maybe they know something we don't know but I love Seagate hard drive so we'll find out as they make them but I'm thinking you know a year out what's going to happen to that hard drive if all of a sudden you start having problems. I have not seen a perpendicular hard drive in for a recovery yet so I don't even know what my methods are going to do for trying to do a data recovery with the changes that they've made but my guess is because the data is so much closer together it's going to be incredibly hard to try to get this data back. This is what it looks like when you're writing and reading with your OS pretty much no matter what OS it will move quite violently back and forth across the disk and it can move back and forth 60 times across that platter depending on the size of your platter and where that data exists. So if you've got a hard drive that has a bad sector on it and it's moving back and forth at that speed and you hit that sector it's going to constantly start giving you errors and basically the drive is going to slow down you'll hear some sounds and you may think that your system's locked up or something bad's happened most people don't have a lot of patience with them but even if it was going to recover it may error out and your system may crash or blue screen before you can do anything about it. If you're going to do a recovery one of the ideal methods to do this is going to be imaging you're going to try to do an image from beginning to end. The downside to this is that something like ghost or something that really can't recover from errors in the process is basically going to die in the middle of doing this. So from a software perspective some software that at least knows how to handle some of the basics of retrying and going through that process or at least saving the amount that has already imaged as it's writing across the disk. If you're using a RAID controller and you have a RAID failure imaging is a must because you cannot read the data you cannot mount it in the OS and go after those files so you have to image it using some software or something that's a little bit more redundant and able to write out the pieces that you've already saved. So my suggestion would be there's a couple of free packages out there that do some things, some for Linux, some for Windows, some for Macs and there should be some ways of trying some of this stuff before you have to go through this process but there is a program called TestDisk that has basically been written for most of these applications that can go in and try to read sectors and retry and do things like that on forensicspeak.com. So one of the basics that we're going to do now with trying to reassemble the hard drive is we need to go through some of the items that I think are a little bit different that you might not be aware of and so we're going to go through how I break down what kind of errors that I'm dealing with because if you have a scratch platter in most cases there's not going to be much you can do about it. I'm going to break these down into two different categories. By software I mean that in most cases when you do a recovery you might be able to use the OS to get your data back you might be able to switch back and forth between different OS's to read the data but it's going to be something that doesn't really require you to open the hard drive or to get parts and replace them. So 85% of all the hard drives that I get in for our recoveries are some method like this. For instance a Mac a Mac hard drive I get a number of these where someone has one Mac and their hard drive died they got there's thousands of pictures on it maybe they have another Mac and they go and they plug this hard drive into the Mac and it can't mount it or read it either but there are some simple methods that you can use say use windows with Mac drive or something on it it will mount a lot of damaged Mac OS drives for some reason there are some things that even Mac can't recover or repair from that you can plug into something else or boot on a Nopix disk and try to read the partition or something along those lines and it may even skip some of the errors that are already occurring. Hardware is the big one and that's basically what we're talking about here so I'm going to break hardware down into these categories most of the items that we can do are just with the electronics itself the IDE board so if you're able to find this board that matches exactly what you are looking for with the firmware you pop off four screws put this board on and go for it and in most cases even if you've got the wrong board you can try it and it won't do any more damage to your hard drive that you just won't work so sometimes two boards or three boards might be the trick here depending on what firmware is on those boards and where they came from so sometimes it's worth shopping eBay especially for these older drives because in some cases you can order them on eBay and get them for 20 bucks or something and maybe actually get a recovery done so if 85% is software and 10% is hardware that's 95% of your drives right there that you can somehow get data back using one of those formats the heads and the platters are put together because sometimes the heads and the platters cause each other's problem and so you have to treat them simultaneously and then the motor which I described earlier is very difficult to deal with so these are the laws according to Scott that I try to teach some of my employees when we're trying to do something to try to get now the first one don't be emotionally attached listen guys you do not need your porn back this week you can wait another week so the other one is damaged hard drives do not do the same thing twice I get all kinds of hard drives that one day of the week they do one thing the next day of the week they're doing a completely different thing I had a situation where I had a hard drive I struggled with every day all week long and I still could not get it to mount or do anything and I plugged it into a machine and I just went home frustrated on a Friday came back on Monday it took it a while it was acting very very slow part of the reason is because the heads have to keep retrying whenever there's an error sometimes it works itself down to a smaller piece of data that's not corrupt and then it actually will mount and you can do something with it so in some cases plugging it in leaving it for three or four days you come back it actually is functioning it's not going to be fast there's no data recoveries that I can think of that are extremely fast unless it was just like your partition got corrupt you can image it and go back and carve it out with some data readers or something along that line persistence is not futile the persistence is that same thing it ties directly to your hard drive doesn't do the same thing twice so sometimes when you're trying one thing tomorrow it might actually work and it might do something different the other thing is too is that the tech document out there freeze your hard drives, try to blah blah blah those kind of things a lot of the times it will work but your problem is when you freeze a hard drive is that you've got condensation problems almost immediately after you start that hard drive up so you've got like 10 minutes if you're able to read the drive if you're not you probably shot most of your chances of trying to get that data back anyway because it will just further damage the drive most drives are hurt by any kind of humidity any kind of condensation that's on the platters hits the heads and it's ruined it I would say that if you cool it instead maybe down to 45 degrees it seems to work a little bit better one of the ways that I've been doing this is if you guys are familiar with a pelter cooling system at all some of them are used for some CPUs and things like that what's that these things typically cost like $50 basically it's a ceramic piece that on one side will read the heat off of whatever item that you're touching and spit it off on the other side so it makes one side cold and the other side warm there's this particular thing that just came out that's one of these USB plug it in and it cools your drink while you're sitting around at your computer if you take it apart this thing's only $20 and if you take it apart this thing's got this particular ceramic in it you can take off all the pieces except for the ceramic and the heat sink and you can strip off the label of your hard drive put this on top of it and let it sit for a couple of hours and it will cool the casing off enough that it will stay somewhere close to 45 degrees when you plug it in and you get it running it will typically go up a little bit but you'll still hit something in the neighborhood of 60 degrees while it's running and you may actually be able to go directly after the software mounted go directly to what you want to get now one of the things I can tell you about a damaged hard drive and you got damaged sectors is that when you're doing a copy you don't want to go get three or four or five things you want to go find the one piece one at a time and be very surgical about it and go after exactly what you're looking for so if you went and got your JPEG files because your hard drive is working you think and you're fine and then you go over and you get your QuickBooks files well since the head's going to have to move more back and forth while the hard drive is mounted you have a better chance of damaging it further and not getting any of that data back so take your time and go one step at a time and copy out individual components as you can and then go back and get the other ones that are less important it would be terrible if you went and you got your grandma's JPEGs and she really wanted her Quicken files so time is not your friend in that case you want to get it as fast as you can and you want to go just after those components free space is your friend if you started doing a copy and you actually got it mounted and you were able to do a copy if you had that drive die while you're doing the copy you don't want to go back the second time you start it back up if you're able to read it again and copy over the same files that you have you want to have a lot of free space you also sometimes want to have as much space as you can to do an image because when it mounts in the OS if you can't copy those files out sometimes it doesn't mean you can't get an image if you get an image of the file then you can go and process it on another hard drive or do something else with it completely separately and not have to worry about whether or not there's bad sectors on it because you're on a new device at that point there's a lot of software that will carve out different independent pieces one of the pieces of software that I like a lot is called NTFS Explorer it's made by a company called Runtom.org and I don't work for them or anything but it is one of the better packages because if you're doing an NTFS recovery for Windows you can skip most of the other files it will actually go in, read the MFT it will give you your sectors back you can go back and find the exact cluster where your data is and you can drill down to that particular directory and copy out just the piece you need and skip all these other bad sectors of the OS and things that you might not need a lot of data recovery programs don't do that a lot of them will scan the whole hard drive come back and build you a list they're not taking into account that it may die in the process of scanning this hard drive and trying to go through that whole thing when it hits a sector that's bad further down the line so I try to be as surgical as possible and get those things down heat is not your friend we kind of went over that already try not to freeze your hard drive you could refrigerate your hard drive just do anything to try to keep that condensation down but one of the things that happens to metal when it gets hot and it's starting to spin up is it expands so if your head is only floating two one millionth of an inch over the platter if it expands it will sometimes hit the head at that point in time so the cooler you can keep it the better off you're going to be some of the only hard drives I know that use the glass platters which will happen a little bit less from a standpoint of expanding and hitting the heads that's typically going to be like the Hitachi's, the IBM hard drives things along that line everybody on eBay is your friend because you are going to look up every hard drive you can you're going to email those guys find out what the model number is and the date to go get that board so you want to try everything you can before you open the case and I'm going to show you what the inside of some of this stuff looks like the big thing is on the logic board itself on the IDE controller board on the bottom of the hard drive heat is the big problem because a lot of times you'll be able to touch the board and you'll be able to feel where it's overheating sometimes when you take it off you can actually see where it's burned through the chip or done something else different type of connectors make a big difference sometimes sometimes moving from an IDE connector to a USB connector you're actually able to mount it on another device a lot easier and you would be amazed at the number of times I could just plug one in from a USB device into a firewire and it actually work and get past that problem so that can help you get past some of the basics even if there's sector problems different OS's make a big difference Nopix is actually really great for trying to go after those files because it opens almost anything and you can have a driver for almost any type of RAID controller or anything already on the drive Mac OS like I described already you can stick that on a Windows box with Mac disk sometimes just taking the hard drive flipping it over flipping it upside down plugging it in and waiting a little while actually works too you may actually see that it will mount on Windows but it will show you that there's no known type of file system on it those are the times that you want to image the drive because if you can image it you can skip all those other problems because it basically means that there might be damage on the drive but it's affected something that's going to tell it to NTFS is on this drive or FATS on this drive or Linux is on this drive if you see it mount on there just go straight for an image and just skip all the other stuff that you can use as many fans everything else that you can electronics this is what it will look like when you go to look at these chips and look at the board and this is very simplistic to replace like I said before screws this happens a lot I see a lot of boards that once you take it off you flip it over like I said this is the 10% of the other problem that I can't read I've got to go find that board I will find either something burned through the chip or some spot where something burned up head crash typically it doesn't fall off like that but it can usually it will hang there and sometimes do some platter damage along the way but if you've got some heads that look like this where there's actually head damage the platter was actually pretty good I was actually able to deal with the platter once I replaced the heads so this is the basics of how I have to do this there are no tools for trying to replace heads on the platter so what you've got to do is build your tools out of paper and believe it or not this is the best way to do it you take a little piece of paper and you fold them up so that there's enough resistance that they push back and forth and you slip it in now it's a little more complicated than this from a standpoint of lining it up I'll show you a picture of that in a second and if you're lucky enough some drives have this ramp on them and the ramp is really cool because it will help you line up the heads when you get them back on there because you cannot be off on these heads so you need to take your time when you move this component to another drive you find the other drive, you take the other stuff out you go ahead and have it ready and you go ahead and disassemble this part you slowly pull these out making sure that your paper is stuck there and keeps them apart and then you will go ahead and move it over now this takes about two hours of time once you're good at it so I'm thinking three or four but it can be a life saver and once you do it a couple of times you'll have it down so if you want to start your own recovery business so again you've got to pull these parts exactly from the same drive same manufacturer, everything's going to be exactly the same this is what the piece of paper looks like when it's stuck in there and it keeps those heads apart those heads cannot touch if they do touch then you have a mess and it will not work but typically you can do this I've done it up to three sets of heads six heads altogether I've never been successful at more than that so far but that's what it looks like and once they slam together the head itself is actually mounted at the end of the slider down here and they hit each other and it ruined it so there's nothing you can do you just put it aside, go buy a new eBay hard drive and start all over again this is what the ramp looks like on some of the drives that are out there the ramp itself will help you line that up and you can get that right back on and once it's there, you're good but take your time and make sure you look to make sure that they're mounted on there correctly and you'll end up the second that you start up the drive it will hit the edge of the platter as it starts to move back on to the drive and once you've done that you've just got metal scraping all the way across the platter because it doesn't know the heads aren't there anymore so that'd be it for the drive this one I think is possible this is one that I actually did a head replacement and I did the same exact thing and because it has ramps it doesn't matter that there's four heads there it took me a little bit more time but I got it done this one is also possible what you would use for your tools here is tweezers tweezers expand out so you can bend them just right so that you can try to hold them around this but it's a little bit like operation you've got to try to make sure that you do not touch your platter when you're putting them back on but these heads park in the middle and there's no outside ramp so you've got to be extremely cautious with that while you're reassembling that trying to get it back on this one I would say is not possible this is where you pray because you're not going to get that data back that's a SCSI 9 9 platter 16 heads that's not going to happen so looking at platter damage this is what it would look like and before you start buying parts this would be one of the first things I say to do is to go ahead and take a quick look at the inside of the drive and make sure that you don't see the silver on the platter sliding off or you don't see anything on the pillow because if it's on that little pillow on the filter then it's underneath and you won't be able to see it but once it's already done this it's too late and this is what it looks like now this is a glass platter has a little bit of ceramics in it this is from an IBM drive in the pictures on the disc you'll be able to see a little bit better but you can actually see right through this hard drive you can actually see the metal underneath it on the bottom both heads on both sides ate the oxide ate the thin film right off of it and destroyed the drive this is another one where the heads hit it that's impossible you're not going to be able to do anything with that one either and when you get one like I described earlier where the head actually falls off or hangs off it'll start writing these little S's all over the place and eventually you'll get grooves all the way around and you can just have to tell your grandma that she's not going to get her pictures back so your motor failure this one it may actually move it may not but here's a good indication of when your motor isn't working properly the plastic piece over here if the motor doesn't reach its maximum velocity that little plastic piece will not teeter out of the way so if you want to take off the top look at the hard drive and power it up if that plastic piece doesn't move your motor is not working correctly so you may be able to move a single platter to another system when you disassemble it this is the spindle piece right here you cannot take this out it is manufactured to be exactly in the right spot if you take that out I doubt seriously you'll ever get it back together correctly enough that it will move but in this particular case the two platters as you can see have nothing on them they are just pieces of glass and they have a little ring that sits in the middle which is on top of that screwed together and that's all that's holding it together there's nothing to keep them aligned so this would be the reason that you could not move two platters to another drive it would be easier to move the heads that's the problem the way you tell if the motor is frozen is if when you open it up you take a screwdriver and you put it at the edge of the spindle right here you can actually spin it then it's spinning freely you're in good shape you could probably replace the board on the bottom and it will probably work most of the time this is why it looks like that through the cylinder the cylinder actually cuts through the disc that information again and so your chances are gone at that point