Zorac (zorac) wrote,
Zorac
zorac
  • Mood: inquisistive

Fun with hard disks

Ah, the joys of data recovery! First we have a disk that's causing it's server to throw errors left, right and centre. After replacing it, we had to try and retrieve it's contents: The disk came from a FreeBSD system, and was originally part of a RAID set-up, so had ended up as a 1-disk array. We had to do the recovery on a Linux box - which uses a different partitioning system and doesn't recognise the left-over RAID crud at all. The trick was to create a loopback device onto the raw disk with an offset to skip over the raid header, thusly: losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/hdd1 -o 8192. This gave us a virtual device with the actual data partition in it, which could then be mounted by mount -tufs -oro,ufstype=44bsd /dev/loop0 /mnt/hd. The data could then be copied off to the new system.

The second duffer came from an NT box, but the BIOS wouldn't even recognise it, so we had to give that up as a lost cause. About 5 seconds after binning it, I realised that I've always wanted to dissect a hard drive - as did everyone else in the office. I've taken apart plenty of dead floppies in my time, but this was much more fun. Blithely ignoring the "Warranty Void if removed" stickers (some of which could only be seen after disassembling half the drive), we broke it down to it's component parts. Highlights include the disks themselves - possibly the most perfect mirrors I've ever seen (until they acquired grubby pawmarks), the heads (but they're so tiny) and a pair of surprisingly powerful magnets (as in you can barely pry them apart). Much fun was had by all.
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