[HN Gopher] Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with the ...
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Retrieving 1TB of data from a faulty drive with the help of
woodworking tools
Author : jgrahamc
Score : 373 points
Date : 2023-08-17 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.jgc.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.jgc.org)
| compiler-guy wrote:
| This is both very clever and very cool.
|
| It's not a matter of if your storage media will fail, just when.
|
| Always keep backups.
| jraph wrote:
| > very cool
|
| Yep, exactly -18C cool.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| I see a lot of tutorials on running mechanical hard disks without
| covers on and such.
|
| Years ago, the drives had safety systems to prevent this.
| duffyjp wrote:
| In the late 90's I was an instructor in a youth PC repair
| class. For a fun demonstration we took an old IDE drive,
| removed the lid and had it running defrag. We did this outside.
| Next to show how important it was to prevent liquid spills we
| poured some cola directly into the drive. It sprayed everywhere
| but the drive kept working fine. Kids got a good laugh and did
| not learn a lesson that day.
| daneel_w wrote:
| Does anyone have any advice (other than sending to a professional
| data recovery service) for how to access data on an HDD whose
| controller card stopped working, and refuse to accept a spare
| controller card taken from a brand new identical HDD?
| toast0 wrote:
| Just a double check... you said in thread you have two of these
| drives that died at 1 year old. Did you have a third, working,
| drive you're transplanting boards from?
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > other than sending to a professional data recovery service
|
| Ah, so you don't really need that data...
| danparsonson wrote:
| Is it not the case that the controller boards store track data
| specific to an individual drive? I don't think they can be
| swapped out.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I fear this is the case...
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Historically they did contain a map of physically unusable
| sectors particular to the physical platters in the drive, and
| I'd be surprised if they didn't now. So the consequence of a
| controller swap was making the assembly unstable because you
| were using a foreign sector map; usually it was still enough
| to recover as long as you weren't writing new data.
|
| But nowadays a drive controller is far more complex, e.g. it
| might implement transparent hardware AES encryption, in which
| case swapping the board loses the key. And I've no doubt
| there are many modern manufacturing-related tricks for yield
| that go into them as well, any of which might make a
| different set of platters than what was shipped unreadable.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Yes, they (the PCB's) cannot be swapped unless you also swap
| the chip containing the adaptive data.
| londons_explore wrote:
| How do you know for sure it's the controller?
|
| Note that many controllers store parts of their firmware/config
| on the disk platter, so without the disk platter the board may
| not show up via sata.
| daneel_w wrote:
| It's my suspicion, at least. In fact I have two of those
| drives, bought at the same time, and both died in the same
| sudden way with no more than two weeks between.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Wasn't there a firmware bug in some drives that made them
| fail after a certain number of seconds of uptime? Was a
| workaround/fix published?
| toast0 wrote:
| Yes, there was a well published Seagate issue [1] that I
| think was related to uptime, and you could fix it after
| the fact by grabbing a shell through the ttl serial on
| the jumper pins. (Edit: thanks jaclaz for providing a
| link with more details!) It was claimed Seagate would fix
| it for you under warranty as well, although shipping a
| drive always has risks.
|
| HPe had two rounds of enterprise SSDs that failed because
| the uptime counter overflowed, but I never saw content
| about fixing those after the fact. And I think I had seen
| a different SSD uptime based failure a year or so before.
|
| IMHO, it's best to avoid same batch storage, and if
| that's not possible, stagger the online time to try to
| give enough time to notice a failure, obtain replacement
| storage, install replacement stotage, and migrate data.
| Backups are important too, but it's nicer to have a path
| towards mostly online recovery. And some mostly
| replacable data is hard to justify backups for (do I need
| three copies of format shifted media? probably not, if my
| online storage fails, I can re-rip)
|
| I don't recall hearing about this for Western Digital
| drives, but there's some xbox360 stuff that I thought
| involved the ttl serial on WD drives... It's certainly
| worth exploring. WD green drives do also have a very
| short default timeout to park the drive, and as a result
| can experience a large number of parking cycles in some
| applications, and the parking ramp can wear out; I don't
| think this is really recoverable, the heads are likely to
| get damanged and debris may damage the platters.
|
| [1] https://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/
| jaclaz wrote:
| Only for the record, at the time the Seagate issue was
| due to a bug in the firmware, when the drive was powered
| and found a counter at certain values, it went into a
| sort of loop and failed to "boot" (the internal OS)
| further.
|
| This happened only on some disk drives because it was
| initially triggered by a defective testing equipment only
| on some production lines, see "Root cause" here:
|
| https://msfn.org/board/topic/128807-the-solution-for-
| seagate...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| There were SSD's from an unnamed OEM that would brick
| after overflowing an uptime counter. Cisco and HP were
| both bitten by it:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148
| daneel_w wrote:
| Doesn't ring a bell for me, but given the highly
| questionable tiering/marketing methods from HDD
| manufacturers these days and the fact that they have been
| reducing warranty durations by some 50%, that type of
| planned obsolescence wouldn't surprise me.
|
| The drives are 3.5" 2TB WD Green purchased around 2012,
| and had been in use for about 1 year when they both died.
| justinclift wrote:
| > 2012
|
| If that's not a typo, then it seems like those drives
| have been powered off for about 10 years.
|
| I _think_ powered off hard drives are commonly said to
| retain data for um... maybe 3 years (from rough memory).
| So, your drives have probably lost their magnetism (and
| thus the data). :(
| daneel_w wrote:
| Not a typo, they've been powered off for around a decade.
| But HDDs (just like floppies) don't lose their magnetized
| property in just 3 years, or even 10 years, barring the
| very rare case of an extreme fluke or environmental
| exposure. Flash memory (memory cards, USB sticks, SSDs)
| loses _electrical charge_ relatively fast, however. That
| might be what you 're thinking of.
| justinclift wrote:
| Thanks. Yeah, I was probably thinking of SSD's then. :)
| jaclaz wrote:
| Naah, that may apply to SSD's, not to good ol' (rotating
| platters) hard disks, the magnetism does not evaporate.
|
| The only issue that may happen on an unpowered for
| several years hard disk is so called bearing seizing, the
| (fluid) bearing of the motor/platter may become stuck,
| but it is relatively rare, though some particular
| make/models are more prone to this, and though (usually)
| fixable, in some cases it can be made to rotate freely
| again, but you need the services of a specialized
| service, as the disk needs to be opened, in some other
| cases the bearing can be replaced, and some specialized
| tools are needed:
|
| https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-motor-bearings
| justinclift wrote:
| Thanks. :)
|
| That reminds me of a work colleague a few years ago. He
| got an ancient drive working again by tapping it on the
| side with a screwdriver while powering it on, to get it
| "unstuck".
| jaclaz wrote:
| Since many years (like 15 or more) the PCB of a hard disk
| contains a chip (essentially an eeprom or flash device)
| containing so-called "adaptive data", a set of data written in
| the factory that are specific to the disk drive (head/platters)
| the PCB is mounted on.
|
| There is specialized hardware (and software) to be able to
| extract the data and save on another board's memory, but the
| poorman's way is that of transferring the actual chip from the
| old board to the new (identical) one.
|
| This, commonly referred to as "ROM swap" is not particularly
| difficult[1] as the chip is usually a rather simple 8 pin one,
| if you are not into this kind of things a hardware repair shop
| (like a phone repair one) will normally make this work for you.
|
| However newish hard disks may have not this separate chip, it
| has to be seen which model yours is.
|
| Here is a site with some more info:
|
| https://hddpcb.eu/gb/content/how-to-swap-hdd-pcb
|
| [1] meaning that it can be done DIY if you are familiar enough
| with soldering/desoldering components
| londons_explore wrote:
| Cool it down to freezer temperatures and see if it works. Heat
| it up to ~60C and see if it works. This applies to both hard
| drives and SSD's.
|
| A good half of "failed" drives can be made to work for at least
| a few hours longer with that method.
|
| Unlike OP, If you see signs of life, don't mess with clamps or
| reflowing. Just leave it in the freezer/oven while you take
| data off it, with longish power/sata cables to a machine just
| outside the freezer/oven door.
|
| I recommend GNU ddrescue for getting data off - when you only
| have a few hours of service life left till it is dead-dead, it
| maximizes data recovery in a given time. There are various ways
| to generate a mapfile to skip recovering free blocks, which are
| worth using if you suspect the drive is mostly empty.
| theolivenbaum wrote:
| And for the freezer method, be careful with humidity when you
| take it out. Worth putting it in a bag with some
| dehumidifiers and just take the cable out
| lacrimacida wrote:
| Couldn't this method risk making it completely irrecoverable
| if it fails?
| sgarland wrote:
| Freezing / heating? Other than the risk of humidity as
| mentioned, not really. Unless the head crashes into the
| platter, it's unlikely to do anything that would
| permanently kill the drive.
|
| That said, if you ever have a drive with absolutely
| critical, must-have data, don't bother with any of this and
| just ship it to professionals. You'll pay dearly, but
| they'll get your data out.
| kwstas wrote:
| There are bios chips on the controller board than need to be
| transfered to the new one. In a reasonably modern drive that
| would be pretty challenging and rewuire a hot air station.
|
| https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_replacement.html
| h2odragon wrote:
| Double check the numbers on the controller boards; HDD's are
| complicated little computers and the manufacturers change
| things during production of a particular model of drive fairly
| often.
|
| If you've got the controller board your drive wants and still
| nothing, then its time for professional help or considering the
| data lost, imo.
| daneel_w wrote:
| The PCBs are of the exact same model. My fear is a DRM type
| scheme connected to serial numbers etc. stored on the
| platters having to match those of the controller.
| h2odragon wrote:
| doesn't even have to be DRM, just "media mapping" where its
| adjusting tot he individual platters and such. like factory
| low-level format stuff.
|
| _I_ don 't know how complex HDDs have got, but I recall
| giggling at someone installing linux on an HDD controller
| board several years ago. So I bet its much worse now.
| freedomben wrote:
| > _I 'm tempted to try to permanently fix the SSD using my SMD
| hot air blower. But maybe I should just replace it at this
| point._
|
| Ah, a man after my own heart <3
|
| With the modern widespread trend in tech of treating the
| owner/user as a security threat, it's easy to feel like the
| hacker spirit is dead or dying, and then posts like this rekindle
| my hope for humanity
| [deleted]
| bpye wrote:
| My concern with fixing a storage device is that storage is
| pretty much the worst thing to fail. Maybe as a cache drive or
| perhaps for some large applications - but I wouldn't trust it
| with data I cared about...
| toast0 wrote:
| A fix like this is likely to rebreak in the same way. The
| question becomes how many times do you think it's fixable
| before thermal stress destroys the board. Maybe future
| incidents will be prevented by increasing cooling of the
| device in the installed system?
|
| I'd be ok with this in a machine with regular backups, where
| you're looking at worst case the data from a day or two is
| lost, plus some downtime while getting a replacement and
| restoring a backup, and best case another trip through the
| hot air station. Seems pretty ok to me in that use. Would
| probably be fine for a use case with easily replaceable data
| too: if you've got a fast network connection, it could be
| your steam drive.
| leetrout wrote:
| I just lost data on a firecuda drive that was a few months old.
| The lab could not recover the data and also did not tell me the
| root cause of the drive failure.
|
| Compared with my samsung ssds which have (knock on wood) never
| died in a decade.
|
| I know all brands fail but is there something of lesser quality
| with the firecuda line?
| londons_explore wrote:
| From working tangentially in consumer electronics, I can tell
| you that nearly all failures are design related if you look
| deep enough.
|
| There are some products where some start dying after 1 year,
| and nearly all of them are dead after 2 years.
|
| Other times it's a combination of a bad design and some
| specific use case. For example "these fail after 3 years if you
| turn them on and off every day, but don't fail if you leave
| them running 24x7".
| HPsquared wrote:
| Solder joints seem to be a major failure. That'd be mostly
| fatigue (thermal cycling) and the occasional case of tin
| whiskers.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Yes, but in turn the failure is because the thermal
| expansion coefficient of the board and component were
| insufficiently closely matched (when taking into account
| the elasticity of the board and component)
| jandrese wrote:
| BGAs and hot chips are a bad combo.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Lead-free solder is just shittier than leaded solder.
| You're not wrong about design but better solder would
| reduce the impact of mismatched thermal expansion
| properties.
| toast0 wrote:
| Removing lead from solder should reduce lead poisoning and
| environmental lead in general, which is good.
| Unfortunately, lead-free solder is objectively worse than
| leaded solder in terms of longevity of joints as well as
| requiring a greater working temperature. Things have gotten
| a lot better since introduction though.
| lelag wrote:
| Or sometimes they will die if you leave them on for 40000
| hours.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32048148
| Modified3019 wrote:
| In my view, I do think Samsung's hardware is generally more
| reliable, however this gets negated by their dogshit firmware.
| I've had multiple _different_ samsung enterprise and oem drives
| die because their firmware is full of bugs.
|
| Basically one will suddenly decide it hates life and will then
| only show up as having only 1gb of space and the firmware
| version set as "ERRORMOD" ("error mode"). This is not a time
| counter rollover issue as far as I can tell (though samsung has
| plenty of those too [0]) as there wasn't anything in my smart
| logging that would indicate a time value they approached and
| died. Samsung's firmware is just super buggy and can get caught
| in a bad state. You can find business purchasers complaining
| about these issues as well. [1]
|
| Someone once decompiled the firmware of the EVO 840 before they
| started encrypting it. Have a look at the "Bugs" section to
| have a laugh:
| http://www2.futureware.at/~philipp/ssd/TheMissingManual.pdf
|
| So when you see a samsung enterprise/oem drive on ebay with 99%
| of it's life left, what you are really buying is a drive with
| bugs but no way to obtain fixes, since samsung will give you
| the business version of _go fuck yourself_ by telling you to
| "contact your vendor".
|
| Part of the problem is samsung cultivates a complete shitshow
| where vendors will "customize" firmware, so an identical drive
| from lenovo will need different firmware than one from HP. The
| other part of the problem is Samsung's consumer drive branch is
| basically completely separate from their oem/enterprise branch
| despite what is mostly the same hardware and firmware. So while
| the consumer branch has historically had to eventually face the
| market consequences of gross negligence, the enterprise branch
| is shielded by misdirection to the vendors.
|
| Fortunately mine where quite cheap so not much loss, but still,
| they lost any illusion of competence over other companies in my
| eyes.
|
| Note there is a collection of samsung firmware here, though it
| is hardly complete: https://github.com/lolyinseo/samsung-nvme-
| firmware
|
| P.S. Also note there is a poorly documented but common form of
| ssd "failure" that can happen. If you have a drive suddenly not
| show up on next boot (especially after power loss), using the
| _power cycling_ technique can often recover a drive:
| https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
|
| [0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsung-990-pro-health-
| dro...
|
| [1]:
| https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/pm9a3-firm...
| jandrese wrote:
| The worst part is that it's so hard to find a vendor with SSD
| firmware that isn't terrible. So many buy the cheapest
| controller chip and then ghost you when the drive crashes and
| bricks itself.
|
| Many _many_ drives, even from big companies like HP, came
| with the damn Sandforce controller that tends to brick itself
| if your computer ever goes to sleep. I know organizations
| that ended up replacing entire swaths of drives because they
| were dying so often. It was enough of a problem that some
| people went to extreme (legally dubious) lengths to try to
| recover the drives. I mean just look at the procedure:
|
| https://computerlounge.it/how-to-unbrick-sandforce-ssd/
|
| Of course Sandforce was completely unhelpful in trying to fix
| the problem.
| mdip wrote:
| About 15 years ago I made quite a bit of money recovering data
| from damaged HDDs using various low-tech means.
|
| It started when I threw a very expensive (at the time) 1.5TB HDD.
| It had various things going on with it but I recall it wouldn't
| spin up and once I was able to get it to spin up, it wouldn't
| function for more than a few minutes before it would error out
| and the drive would become unrecognized by the PC.
|
| I remember I made it spin up again entirely by accident. Figuring
| the drive was toast, I'd removed it and while fumbling with the
| cables it slipped out of my hand and landed on the hardwood
| floor. I hadn't noticed when I was holding the drive, but it felt
| like something was "stuck"[0] and after picking it up off the
| floor, it felt like the components were moving again. On a whim I
| plugged it back in and it worked.
|
| The second problem, I knew, was thermal. The drive got incredibly
| hot very quickly. Being that it was a 1.5TB drive at a time when
| "that was big", I'd need the drive to be functional for hours to
| complete copying the data.
|
| I had a dorm fridge in my office and debated putting it in one of
| my external cases and running a cable from there but knew that
| the moisture wouldn't play well. Because I kept very little in
| this fridge, it was filled with a few cans of soda, coffee
| creamer and about ten of those blue gel bags that people
| freeze/put in coolers in lieu of ice. I did this _mainly_ because
| the fridge was really loud and keeping it stocked with _anything_
| made it run a lot less.
|
| The upshot was that the size of these "bags" was just a little
| larger than a 3.5" HDD, if left out they maintained their
| temperature for hours[1]. I grabbed two, placed the drive on top,
| put two more on top of the drive and managed to image the whole
| thing.
|
| It was so simple, I popped an ad on Craigslist and $200 "I'll get
| your data back or you don't pay." Out of 30-40 drives, there were
| less than 5 that were beyond help. About half were software
| issues, many of which were simple to resolve. Very few required a
| tool like photorec, but it did the job when needed[2]. The rest
| were handled with an extremely stable power supply, four gel bags
| and patience. Except for one of my own drives, I never popped
| screws and generally didn't resort to "applying physics and
| gravity" in hopes that if I couldn't recover anything, I'd at
| least give them a drive that was "no more damaged than when I
| received it" (they still signed a document covering me for any
| liability).
|
| The whole experience made me realize how _critical_ keeping
| "components other than the CPU" cool is. Every drive I've
| experienced hardware failures on[3] has had something heat-
| related coinciding. I remember one time I couldn't figure out
| which of the 8 drives was indicating failure; I saw one of the
| three fans in the drive cage wasn't spinning. I shut the server
| down, pulled out the fan and its 3-drive set, figured _has to be
| the middle drive_ , swapped it and it started rebuilding the
| array on reboot. I guessed right. :)
|
| [0] If you take a drive, lay it flat on a desk and spin it,
| you'll hear things move ... this one didn't.
|
| [1] Provided it's just sitting on a wooden desk.
|
| [2] There was _one_ customer that I 'll never forget and he was a
| reason I stopped doing this entirely. I told him I could recover
| photos/videos/specific file types from his drive but it will
| recovery everything it sees including files that may have been
| intentionally deleted. He said "Oh, no! Don't do that. I'll pick
| up my drive." I still wonder, to this day, what kinds of horrors
| I would have been in for (I rarely did more than a spot check on
| the data, anyway).
|
| [3] I still have a pretty massive custom built storage server
| with an older LSI MegaRAID controller and a mess of SAS HDDs. For
| what it's used for, the speed is more than adequate the
| individual drive costs are substantially less (even taking into
| account SAS over SATA) and they outlive my SSDs.
| hinkley wrote:
| IBM basically had a recall at one point on drive arrays.
|
| They got the bright idea to make the tabs for the sleds out of
| plastic to make them easier to slide in and out, or save a
| couple pennies, or both. Problem was that metal drives in metal
| sleds on metal rails going into metal bays do a pretty reliable
| job of keeping the motherboard and the drives on a common earth
| ground. Plastic rails meant a floating ground, which
| electronics especially do not like. A little static electricity
| or inductance and things get ugly.
|
| If memory serves they added some sort of little grounding cable
| they would send you, making it harder not easier to get the
| drives out. So dumb.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I know those chips are all ball grid array or something, but how
| does one (or more, I suppose) of the contacts fail this way?
| Seems like if the package contracts and lifts, that the copper
| pad would come with it, rather than just a break in the solder.
| I'm not sure what I should be visualizing for a cold solder joint
| on surface mount...
| HPsquared wrote:
| Fatigue cracking from thermal expansion, and also perhaps
| residual stress and creep deformation. Definitely in the
| "mechanical engineering" realm.
| projektfu wrote:
| It's possible that there was a flaw in the original manufacture
| of the board and one of the balls didn't flow properly, but it
| passed QC.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Wouldn't that be DOA though? This has to be some sort of flaw
| that creeps in slowly.
| tbyehl wrote:
| Is 42C even hot for an NVMe? I recently started collecting SMART
| stats for all the drives in my home fleet and that seems about
| typical for the drives I have when idle-ish. I've also seen it
| suggested that keeping NVMe drives too cool is bad for
| performance.
|
| But more importantly, this is a reminder TO HAVE BACKUPS. Many of
| my friends love their Synology systems. I am thrifty so I use
| urbackup and it has saved my butt a few times.
|
| https://www.worldbackupday.com/
| jgrahamc wrote:
| Yeah. I have a Synology and backed up everything except... this
| PC. It was just the "gaming PC" and then I realized that I
| would rather not re-install everything and try to recover the
| drive. It's set up on the Synology now.
| tbyehl wrote:
| Ouch. I'm am grateful to have picked up the "When in doubt,
| back it up anyways" habit before getting burned.
| benoliver999 wrote:
| I have this with movies. I don't back them up because of the
| storage requirements. Everything is ripped from BluRays that
| I own, but... can I be bothered re-doing them?
| tbyehl wrote:
| If you'd already built out the automated "Some stranger on
| the Internet ripped it for me" workflow you could say that
| usenet is your backup.
|
| A buddy just gifted me a decomm'd Synology RS2416+ w/
| expansion unit full of drives that could, just, back up
| what I have... and I am definitely not going to do that.
| HankB99 wrote:
| I don't think 42C is at all hot for an NVME SSD. But I don't
| recall the suggested limit offhand.
|
| > TO HAVE BACKUPS
|
| Agree. I admire the diagnostic skills and ingenuity to recover
| the data, but was thinking I would just restore from backup in
| the same situation. But I'm weird. I have a "home lab" file
| server with a true server H/W that my desktop and laptop back
| up to as well as a remote server that the local one backs up
| to.
| sickmate wrote:
| Generally safe operating temperatures are between 0 and 70
| degrees celsiuis.
|
| e.g. Samsung
| https://download.semiconductor.samsung.com/resources/data-sh...
| iamjackg wrote:
| For some reason the Max field in the picture says 42.4deg, but
| if you look at the center target you'll see that it says
| 88.7deg. I missed it too at first and was equally confused.
| radicality wrote:
| That says 38.7C I think. I have a standalone FLIR which plugs
| into an iphone, and the way it works is:
| min/max/avg=min/max/avg of current frame, and the temperature
| written in the center is temperature at the crosshair. Hence
| the crosshair temperature cannot be > max.
| jve wrote:
| Ah yeah. I also misread it as 88,7, but looked after your
| commend and lo and behold, it says 38,7 :)
| tbyehl wrote:
| That would be bad but I read that as 38.7c.
| [deleted]
| kosolam wrote:
| Awesome! Thanks for sharing all the technical details. Sure could
| help in real life situations
| abotsis wrote:
| Too bad we didn't have such technology for the xbox "red ring of
| death". oh wait.
| [deleted]
| aquafox wrote:
| Can someone please explain the physics behind
|
| 1) A "faulty connection" and why it fails at a certain temp? Is
| it a partially broken circuit that doesn't work anymore if
| resistance is too high?
|
| 2) Why airblowing fixes it. Because it melts the crack together?
| Any why it doesnt do any other harm to the SSD?
| kortex wrote:
| It sounds like to me a faulty solder joint (crack between the
| smd pin and the pad). Cooling probably causes a differential
| contraction which brings the pin into better contact, and of
| course clamping achieves the same.
|
| It may have started with a hairline defect that got worsened by
| thermal cycles.
|
| If it is a bad solder joint, reflowing bridges and fixes the
| joint. It won't harm the chips as long as the temperature is
| correct, since it needed to be soldered in a reflow oven in the
| first place. However (I believe) there is some risk of excess
| heat corrupting some data, and/or worsening the defect, so if
| you can back up first using the jury-rig, that's certainly
| preferable.
| sfink wrote:
| Reminds me of when I fixed my computer with a chopstick back when
| I was a poor college student.
|
| I didn't know anything about cold solder joints at that time, but
| I did discover that my flaky motherboard would start working when
| I flexed it a certain way. So I wedged a bamboo chopstick between
| the motherboard and the case to keep it in a little bit of
| flexion. Lasted the rest of the year.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Lexi-tangent: This is a good example of English refusing to
| follow rules. C-clamps and G-clamps are exactly the same clamp.
| schoen wrote:
| In a way, C and G are the same letter!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G#History
| jaystraw wrote:
| I came here to comment on G-clamp. I wonder where the author is
| from. I started building things as a kid, I've worked for quite
| a few contractors over the decades, I've sold some of my wooden
| creations and met many skilled people with beautiful shops in
| the US and Australia and have never ever once heard G-clamp.
|
| G-clamp makes total sense, I'm just curious!!
| yardshop wrote:
| He's probably not from England because there they call them
| cramps!
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I am British but also French and lived in many different
| places. I'm just confused. I imagine someone called it a G
| clamp in front of me at some point and I just started
| calling it that.
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm also British (SW) without the French or many
| different places - 'cramps' is new to me as far as I can
| remember. I'd call it a G clamp, and so does Screwfix,
| fwiw.
|
| (Wiktionary does give the clamp meaning too, not with a
| UK qualifier though.
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cramp)
| watersb wrote:
| > _strips of a Silicon Valley Bank credit card under the SSD to
| support the PCB._
|
| Good to know it's still useful.
| bdd wrote:
| Reflowing the controller worked for me twice for now. Once with
| an Intel Optane drive that worked without issues for 3 years and
| started overheating one day. And another one from a fanless
| machine that used an mSATA drive that chose to die on a Sunday,
| with no spare mSATA disk lying around. In both cases I went for
| short hunting under a microscope, looking for that one guilty
| shorted cap, yet finding none. It was the controllers with
| "tired" BGA solder balls, which could use some tender loving care
| of 225degC (soak) -> 400degC (peak) -> 325degC (hold) reflow.
| russdill wrote:
| That's _quite_ aggressive. I typically reflow with _peak_ 225C.
|
| https://microchip.my.site.com/s/article/SAM-Cortex-M3-M4-M7-...
| amelius wrote:
| According to that datasheet peak temp should be above 245C
| for at least 20s.
| bdd wrote:
| Dunno. This works for me without damaging the parts, pads, or
| traces. Your link is for PCBA reflow ovens. Talks about
| minutes long of exposure. I'm using a Atten ST-862D hot air
| station with questionable temperature and airflow accuracy.
| For an M.2 drive I'll probably soak 225 for 15 seconds 3
| times the size of the chip areas in circles. Hit my memory-1
| button to go to 400 and focus on the chip for 3 seconds. Hit
| memory-2 to go down to 300 and one up arrow for 325 for 5
| more seconds while watching nearby caps' solder pads and
| ensuring they don't fly away. -\\_(tsu)_/-
| russdill wrote:
| Yes, those temps are absolutely sane for hot air. You
| didn't specify that.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| That sounds low, unless you are using one of the commercial
| brands notorious for displaying too-low temperatures (so that
| their iron/air/oven will be "the good one" that works when
| others don't).
| sllabres wrote:
| "But, of course, the SSD gets quite hot during operation so I
| used one of the heatsinks from the PC and another made from part
| of carpentry square and some thermal adhesive tape to keep things
| cool."
|
| Instead of this i would suggest a fan. Even small ones create
| much more airflow than needed when please next to a device.
| klyrs wrote:
| A block of metal is great heatsink, and a long ruler like that
| is both thermally conductive and has decent surface area to
| radiate heat away. More importantly, a fan is not a carpentry
| tool. Now, one could use a drill, shop vac, or circular saw to
| generate wind, but they'd be much less energy efficient than
| the passive radiator.
| rocqua wrote:
| Circular saws sure do produce a surprising amount of wind,
| but the thought of using one for cooling is horribly
| terrifying.
| klyrs wrote:
| Thank you
| ascar wrote:
| Doesn't that really depend on the metal? E.g. copper is a
| great thermal conductor while stainless steel a really poor
| one.
| klyrs wrote:
| Of course it depends on the metal! But for a hackjob like
| this, I'm betting it was run without any thermal management
| first, and then with the ruler as the first thing at
| hand... that the effort succeeded at that stage suggests
| that the alloy is sufficient.
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Combination square blades are normally plain carbon steel,
| not stainless.
|
| Actually, almost nothing in a wood shop is stainless
| because it sharpens poorly[0] compared to O1, A2, or any of
| the other tool steels you'll find in a wood shop.
|
| [0] Yes, I realize that stainless and carbon steel are two
| whole classes of alloys, all with different
| characteristics. Based on my experiences with kitchen
| knives, I'll stand by my claim that at least the common
| ones sharpen poorly compared to the common carbon steel
| alloys.
| sllabres wrote:
| I didn't understand the blog post as a challenge to _only_
| use carpentry tools but think he used what was available in
| his shop. (Most carpenter wouldn 't have thermal adhesive
| tape or a thermal camera either ;-)
| HankB99 wrote:
| For long term applications I much prefer passive cooling (AKA
| a hunk of metal.) I have one Raspberry Pi 4B in a case with a
| small heat sink on the processor and a small fan driven from
| the GPIO pins. It keeps the processor within limits even when
| overclocked and heavily loaded. Some day the fan will stop
| working and the processor will overheat (under heavy load)
| and throttle to prevent self destruction.
|
| I have two Compute Modules (CM4s) and found a passive heat
| sink that is finned aluminum that covers the entire module.
| There is no fan to fail. I can overclock the CM4 to 2 GHz and
| load it for stress testing and it remains well within limits.
| One of these is equipped with an NVME SSD and I was surprised
| to see it reach excessive temperatures under heavy loads
| despite the PCIe x1 connection on the Pi. I got a "hunk of
| copper" NVME cooler, cut it to fit a 2230 NVME and it keeps
| the NVME SSD within reasonable limits.
| samstave wrote:
| You resurrected a memory in me ;
|
| I am currently in the market for window fans on Amazon...
|
| I was looking at several today, but you just brought back a
| fond memory for me:
|
| When I was a kid in the Bay Area - all my family was in tech -
| My grandfather with GE, my neighbor with NASA, and blah blah
| blah - saratoga had a Nissan Z40 density of teslas to that
| community today (fairchild, lockheed, nasa, ge, ibm were
| basically all the neighbors) (My GPs bought their Saratoga home
| in 1959 for $24,000. Sold in ~2000 for ~$2.5MM -- It currently
| sold in 2022 for $3.2MM ( this is to illustrate that the bay
| area silicon valley culture with "fanngs" has been around a lot
| FN longer than those who think they invented Silicon Valley
| culture - no - you inherited it, then modified it. There are
| shoulders you cant see....
|
| Anyway - I rolled my eyes when I was ~8 or so years old and my
| dad showed me the window fan he made.
|
| It was an array of Computer Case Fans in a NxN(window size) and
| he had a ton of CPU/case fans that he screwed together and made
| a window fan for the bay area summers in the 80s...
|
| He was able to get fans super cheap through his network of
| people in silicon valley in the 80s and build weird things.
|
| Now I order the same thing from Amazon for $40 and it has
| thermostat and speed controls...
|
| I wonder how much he built his window fan from.
|
| --
|
| EDIT - I did some maths ;
|
| They bought for 24K, assume a 30 year mortgage (I recall when
| my grandfather paid off the house - but I dont know what year
| it was) -- but assume 24k/30 years by 800 months of payments,
| it was $66/month (but we will ignore a lot of interest factors,
| and go simple)
|
| If you were to finance the same house THE SAME HOUSE today -
| for its 3.2MM price (not including interest rates/other factors
| - simple math) ; $8,800 a month payment for same 30 year terms.
|
| 134 TIMES the monthly payment for the SAME HOUSE. THE SAME
| HOUSE.
|
| Are you making 134 times what a person in 1959 working as a
| nuclear plant design engineer for General Electric who designed
| Hanford and a bunch of nukes?
|
| Sure - maybe - but do you have the buying power? He kept every
| receipt for the milk delivery guy for decades... Do you keep
| all your door dash receipts?
|
| The tech world has been raped by the financial world.
|
| ---
|
| OMG I think I figured something out:
|
| >*Sure - maybe - but do you have the buying power? He kept
| every receipt for the milk delivery guy for decades...*
|
| I just had a REALLY dark realization.
|
| My grandfather, Kenneth Victor Stave, wasa nuclear engineer for
| General Electric, for 50 years.
|
| He died of esphogial cancer via exenguination ... we won (I
| dont know the details) a lawsuit against GE and my grandmother
| was awarded $$$ for such... (I dont know the amount because my
| great-uncle stole it from me - also working for the state
| department (we have a lot of connections to dept of energy))
|
| --
|
| But I just put it together, my grandfather had milk deliveries
| to our house for decades.
|
| He kept every single receipt.
|
| Milk was used in administering nuke materials to orphans to
| measure how they affected thyroid/edocrin/blah -- and they kept
| this research....
|
| My grandfather died of such.
|
| But my grandfather (and my other great grandfather (Folsom (yes
| - everything thats named Folsom is named after him)... (this is
| imoprtant for a reason you will know in a moment) ((I think I
| discovereed my familial curse)) [gimme a sec to explain]
|
| My Gramps - Was a lead designer on a lot of NUKE projects for
| GE. (I got my design chops when I was 5 years old doing
| diagrams from his textbooks (at FIVE YEARS OLD) which were my
| highschool and college texts years later)
|
| ---
|
| Sorry this is just a frantic thought...
|
| My grandfather KNEW how radiation was affecting biologics.
|
| He died of radiational thyroid esophageal cancer
|
| we were poisoning orphans in Nevada with milk with radiated
| uranium
|
| My grandfather was likely tracking all milk deliveries for 50
| years to measure the radiation in the milk from the nukes
|
| literally every single day he ate one breakfast for 50 years:
|
| Cornflakes with milk delivered (and tracked) and a single
| banana (potassium which is anti radial in its benefits with
| iodine
|
| HERE IS MY KICKER:
|
| My grandfather was integral to Manhattan Project....
|
| HE NEVER WANTED TO BUY A PIECE OF LAND IN SILICON VALLEY
|
| Our other familial is Folsom (half owner of california...)
|
| But I think I just realized why my grandfather never would buy
| a piece of property in california.
|
| He took his curse to the grave with him.
|
| I found my families curse.
| samstave wrote:
| i AM LITERALLY IN TEARS
|
| I finally know what my grandfather was doing.
|
| He was repenting for his role. My other grandfather worked on
| the Enola Gay...
|
| FUCK - I have a nuclear curse on my family. I am serious -
| this is a wow to me, as this curse eluded me for all my life
| salawat wrote:
| ...You should really check on a few things before getting
| too carried away. After all, nuclear material doesn't just
| end up in milk. You're implying an extra step of
| adulterating milk that was otherwise clean.
|
| ...Also, you're assuming that this adulteration continued
| throughout the course of your grandfather's life, and not
| just the duration of the (inarguably unethical if conducted
| as described) research.
|
| Regardless though, _none of that is your fault_. That was
| him, you 're you. Don't take on your shoulders culpability
| that has no business being there, and just focus on being
| better.
|
| If you do find papers describing the research, however,
| there are worse ways to handle it than going to the
| press/Congress to possibly see if you can track down
| surviving descendants through application of copious
| amounts of FOIA.
|
| Unlike you, the Government absolutely does still hold
| culpability for any such research it did. That'd be right
| up there with the Tuskeegee syphilis experiments there.
|
| Vaya con dios.
| samstave wrote:
| Its with weird realization at 48 years old I am finally
| able to understand some of the things that my grandfather
| was silently telling me.
|
| Its not my fault - but I didnt know until I was able to
| see ;; I have been a "conspiracy theroist" for many years
| thinking all was golden.
|
| My grandfather, now I know - through his gaze - through
| his eyes "the window to the soul" - He wanted to tell me,
| but couldnt tell me until I could understand.
|
| Now that my grandmother has passed at 100 - I now know.
|
| I now know.
|
| My fathers father built hanford.
|
| My mothers father was a weapons person on the Enola Gay.
|
| I now know the true extent of my nuclear curse.
|
| I need some time to process.
| jxramos wrote:
| I was going to repurpose some small old tower fans for some
| windows in "vent mode" where the window is open slightly but
| has a latch to lock in in place for security.
| salawat wrote:
| >Milk was used in administering nuke materials to orphans to
| measure how they affected thyroid/edocrin/blah -- and they
| kept this research....
|
| Come again on that?
|
| There was research in which nuclear material was introduced
| to orphans through milk who were monitored for radiologic
| exposure?
|
| ...I dare say, it wouldn't exactly surprise me, but if you've
| got a reference to the data/research project, inquisitive
| minds would like to know.
| samstave wrote:
| https://ahrp.org/1944-1956-radioactive-nutrition-
| experiments...
|
| My grandfather, whilst from seattle was in Schenectady, New
| York at the time...
|
| He didnt move to Saratogo California until 58 or so - and
| bought the house in 1959
| salawat wrote:
| Welp... That was a thing.
|
| <Adds another datapoint on why information asymmetry lays
| at the heart of all evil>
|
| And people give me shit about being overly concerned
| about even the possibility of ethical shortfalls...
| lsh123 wrote:
| Long time ago I saved data from a hard drive by putting it into
| freezer, then copying data, putting it into freezing, copying
| data, ... repeat a lot of times :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| Sounds like a born motorhead keeping his rod running!
| jaegerma wrote:
| > So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes.
|
| Just scrolled through the Ontrack website: Data
| recovery myths: why you should avoid the temptation of a DIY
| repair Suggestions we've seen online that definitely
| _will not_ help you recover your data include: - Putting
| your hard drive in the freezer overnight
|
| :')
| danparsonson wrote:
| This is superb, something like the modern equivalent of the
| engineer's slap that one could use with old spinning drives that
| would no longer spin up.
| [deleted]
| kraquepype wrote:
| I got a cheap used original PS4 and it wouldn't power up unless
| you put pressure on the mainboard, right around the PSU.
|
| I took pieces of wood, and a clamp and applied pressure there
| and it worked.
|
| The same pressure is applied if you use washers on the heatsink
| clamp - I did that and it's been running fine for months.
|
| The solder joints on the GPU get brittle under the stress of
| heat and compressing it restores the connection. Pressure or
| re-flowing is really just a band-aid, the real fix is to re-
| ball the GPU but that gets expensive.
| reasonabl_human wrote:
| Classic. This was a common failure mode for the 360 as well.
| Used to fix friends 360s that had the red ring of death by
| tearing them down, tightening the braces underneath the heat
| sink, and adding an additional case fan.
|
| Never actually had to escalate to reflowing the BGA mount
| underneath the GPU but recall tutorials of how to do that in
| a consumer oven.. thank goodness I never tried that one at
| home.
| snitty wrote:
| Compressive maintenance rather than percussive.
| yardshop wrote:
| I once had an old IBM-PC that the previous owner had upgraded
| with a 20MB hard drive. They said after a while it just stopped
| booting, which is why they gave it to me.
|
| I found that if I manipulated the axle of the read-write-head
| arm where it came out through the bottom of the drive, it would
| "unstick" the head from the surface of the disk, and the thing
| would boot! I imagine there was some kind of lubricant in there
| that would congeal when the machine was off for a certain
| amount of time.
|
| So I left the drive slot cover off, and "fingering" the drive
| would get it to start reliably for a number of years after
| that.
| amatecha wrote:
| Huh this is really good to know, I have a drive where the
| head seems to "stick" to the drive (or something)... I wonder
| if that's a potential common solution, just jostle it around
| and/or lubricate it to free it up a bit??
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I've stuck drives in the freezer twice and they worked long
| enough to recover the data after. Both were small spinning
| external drives (laptop hdds) that had stopped working
| completely.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I had that with an old drive that was in a drawer for years. I
| tried it many times and it wouldn't start. Then I accidentally
| dropped it (it landed pretty hard, hitting a metal table
| leg)... After that it worked fine and I was able to copy off
| all the data.
| randombits0 wrote:
| I did this many years ago when I was a bench tech at a PC shop.
| It was an old Connor 40 meg drive running DOS. If I squeezed it
| just right, it would work. Too much? Failure, Abort/retry/ignore.
| Not enough? Same. So I stood there, squeezing the drive, and
| hitting 'r' for retry, over and over. It worked!
|
| Boss walked by. "What the heck are you doing?"
|
| "I'm milking the data out of this drive!"
| 300bps wrote:
| Same. In 1990 was a field service engineer at a PC shop. We
| used to use circuit cooler or "cold spray" as we used to call
| it.
|
| We had three levels of hard drive data recovery that we did in
| order. Usually didn't have to get past #2.
|
| 1. Put it into another computer
|
| 2. Cold spray the heck out of it and see if it works for an
| hour
|
| 3. Remove the circuit board of the drive and replace it with
| the circuit board from a matching known working drive
|
| If it didn't work after that and they 100% needed the data we
| sent it out to Ontrack. They'd put it in their clean room,
| remove the platters and read the data directly.
| heleninboodler wrote:
| > old Connor 40 meg drive
|
| I would like to call out to the younger readers that this is
| _not_ a typo. Think about how minuscule the capacity of this
| hard drive is, and also that it 's entirely possible it was a
| _full height_ 5.25 " drive, which is 3.25" tall!
|
| Here is a fun tour of old drive technology that goes into just
| how amazingly simple some of it is:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LbFKV_pPAE
| lowestprimate wrote:
| I worked on this drive. It's a 3.5 drive. A long time ago.
| Time for my daily nap and Centrum shot.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Yep I owned a 40 meg drive. I remember when very large
| applications appeared (50 megs) wondering how it was even at
| all possible, and whether it made sense.
|
| It also meant lots of highly unreliable floppies !
| throwaheyy wrote:
| I had this happen once but the force that would cause the drive
| to work seemed to be gyroscopic rather that pressure on the
| casing. So I had to hold the laptop at an angle and turn myself
| around on the spot while I copied the data off. If I stopped
| spinning around the drive would grind/crash and the OS would
| hang.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| You didn't get sick ?
| placesalt wrote:
| I did the same sort of thing with a broken iPod hard drive. If
| it was squeezed, it would work; the fix was to put a folded
| business card in-between the exterior back plate and the drive.
| That would squeeze it enough that it'd work. Never heated up
| enough to start a fire, either, so it was safe!
| toast0 wrote:
| I've had to do that to make batteries stay connected in
| various devices; I've also made shims out of folded aluminum
| foil when battery contacts are just too far apart; and used a
| penny (with the edges coated) to shim a light socket where
| the end of the fixture made it impossible to screw the proper
| bulb in all the way. Good times :D
| dendrite9 wrote:
| Oh man I remember doing that to eke out a little more life
| from several mp3 players, one or two Creatives and an Sansa
| e200. There was also one with a sliding door over an SD card
| with 32MB that I had to pop open and try to fix. I think that
| was around 2003? I'm pretty sure I upgraded to a 64MB card at
| some point.
|
| Shims were plastic cards, subway tickets, and occasionally
| toothpicks as an adjustable clamp while I was trying to
| figure out where the failure was.
| chrisstanchak wrote:
| Found a good use for SVB debit card
| twism wrote:
| beat me to it
| koonsolo wrote:
| Ah Seagate, good memories!
|
| In the 90's they had this policy that you can send them a broken
| HD and they would replace it with a new one. Since they wouldn't
| make the old version anymore, the new drive would have more
| capaciy.
|
| So at first you could just send them your hard drive and you
| would get an upgraded back.
|
| I was probably not the only one who heard about it, and so they
| started testing the incoming drives to see if they were really
| malfunctioning.
|
| I once tried to break such a drive. Formatting the hard drive
| while bashing it on the table. The thing kept going, no problem.
| aftbit wrote:
| My elementary school had a little school supplies store in the
| school itself. I bought a 4-function calculator for math. Next
| week, they had an upgraded calculator which showed the inputted
| formula and supported more functions. The old calculator was
| gone from the store, but my parents wouldn't give me money to
| buy the new one. So I took the old calculator apart,
| disconnected a power wire so it didn't work, and brought it
| back to exchange for the new one.
|
| Sorry school!
| flakes wrote:
| The image in my head of you bashing the harddrive gave me a
| good laugh!
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| >> Y U NO USE SSD ONLY??11
|
| That's why. HDDs aren't failure free but at least most of the
| shenanigans are solved already. Except SMR.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > So, I left the Firecuda in the freezer at -18C for 30 minutes.
| Inserting it into an NVMe M.2 USB case I was able to see the
| drive on my Mac. Success!
|
| Oh so the fridge trick now also works for NVMe drives? I saved
| files out of an old HDD (about 20 years ago) by putting the HDD
| in the fridge for about half an hour too: got the files out of
| the drive then trashed the drive.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I had an emergency one time on the road where the laptop I was
| using late at night randomly shut down in the middle of audio
| editing. Weird. I booted it up and it died again fairly
| quickly. Next time even sooner.
|
| Eventually I realized it was overheating.
|
| Cue getting ice from the hotel dispenser and using a fan and a
| metal tray to keep the laptop alive until my work was done.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Ah yes, good old 'cold storage'.
| OJFord wrote:
| Dodgy flash bodge involving a woodworking clamp & 'strips of a
| Silicon Valley Bank credit card' - this is absolutely the 'most
| HN' story I've ever read!
| creer wrote:
| A ziplock baggy with ice cubes and a little water can absorb a
| lot of heat.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Ah, data compression
| benkillin wrote:
| I just had to login to upvote this. I am a little ashamed to
| admit it took me a second to get it. Then, I chuckled :)
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| >"Now, I couldn't possibly sit and hold the SSD squeezing the
| chip while I copied off the data so I came up with another
| solution. A metal G clamp and strips of a Silicon Valley Bank
| credit card under the SSD to support the PCB."
|
| I know I shouldn't, but the folded up SVB card made me laugh.
| kwstas wrote:
| Ha, I have use a clothespin to get a few documents from an old
| failing usb stick before. Clamp bga rework ftw!
|
| Was the drive getting too hot? Maybe under the gpu or in the
| bottom slot one of those piggyback boards?
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