Does anybody repair and refurbish hard drives?

jnfweber

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I have attached a photo of my non-working hard drive. I just had another one in my A-3000. Fortunately, I had installed a Buddha IDE CF adapter card in one of the Zorro slots and transferred the contents. I have spent the last 3 months trying to get a SCSI CD reader/player in both my A-2000HD and my A-3000. The one attached briefly to the 3000 using a Centronics cable worked well for a while, but now have 2 CD ROM drives which don't work. Maybe I should quit buying them on ebay.

Back to the question, can hard drives be repaired, and who is available to repair them? Or should I junk them, since they are heavy, and together in a wire basket or bucket would make a good boat anchor. And, how difficult is it to get an IDE CD ROM drive to work with my Buddha card in my amigas? Thanks for any input.

Hard Drives.jpgCD Drive.jpg
 
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The only time I believe a hard drive is repairable ( unless you send to a clean room refurb centre for data recovery )
is when the actual physical hard disk platters are in good condition / no errors and unopened and its the drive controller that's failed.

even when the drive controller is swapped over to recover the data the drive is then unreliable due the the factory bad block list that each drive is unique.

in my opinion once a "newish / recentish ( if that's a word )" hard disk has bad blocks its then unreliable and req replacing asap, older drives pre 1gb tended to be more robust and it was common practice ( when i was a nipper ) to simply map out these defects during an MS dos scandisk / defrag
 
If the drives power/spin up you could try this!

I cobbled together a machine from old parts to do nothing more than image old amiga hard drives using Winuae:

ITX board with a PCI slot and IDE ports,
Windows 7,
HDD Regen (windows & bootable cd versions).
Winuae.
Random Adaptec SCSI card.

The goal was to image as many old amiga hard drives I had floating about, somehow I had amassed enough to make my own version of a boat anchor lol.
Some I bought as part of faulty amigas or were just pushed aside and forgotten about when putting in scsitosd cards etc.

I soon stumbled upon those that were fubard and refused to read or image. I decided to try HDDRegen via windows, thinking well they are dead what more can I loose trying? the idea was this program was intended for huge capacity drives, but it can work wonders. I have seen it fully repair huge drives so they could be cloned and saved. So doing this to something like a 1 gigabyte or smaller drive is going to be fairly quick.

I was very happy to find the success rate was pretty good! in some instances the program hit the problem straight away, repaired it and I was able to winuae it as an hdf with no drama at all. Others needed a few passes. Same again imaged with no fuss.

I then proceeded to get 100% hard drive images via winuae for pretty much every single drive that was acting up.
The scsi stuff was a bit more of a pain, setting id's, termination, using adaptor connectors. But once the drive is detected you should be good to go.

I cannot say if anyone elses success rate would be better or worse mind! I need to use the machine again but is packed away after a house move.
The goal is to save the data out and I achieved that better than I had ever hoped.

As for making hard drives reliable thats another matter! I have used drives for a long time after using hddregen! but never fully trusted them again after they went faulty.
 
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