Hacker News Reader

I unbroke an iPod 5G by slamming it into my desk fairly hard. That was about 3 years ago and it's still working. Something about the HDD bearings seizing because of shock.

I have a Seagate HDD in the freezer for 2 years now. Every method of recovery I've used has been unsuccessful. I'm waiting to send it into a recovery service, and $1500+ that I haven't got lying around.

View on HN

If the drive has files that you haven't "needed" in over 2 years, do you really want to spend $1500 or more to access them? Must be personal photos or videos?

I'd hate to lose my personal photos. I'm glad that Apple came out with Time Machine, because I now have backup religion; not only time machine backups but offsite CCC backups.

While doing desktop support, one of my Mac user's hard drive was failing, wouldn't spin up at boot. So you had to help spin it up. One trick was to give the HDD housing a rotation jerk the moment you turn on power. Another was to use a pencil eraser to spin the exposed spindle, also during power on.

Good times.

I've talked to a few recovery experts. They told me taking the cover off destroys the drive. Apparantly the head has some tracks embedded in the cover. If it's not removed in a certain way you can rip the entire thing out.

I don't think he removed the cover. The spindle was was exposed, not the platters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com