damaged hdd: recovery possibilities?

Question

I've had a damaged Samsung HM500JJ Rev. A laptop drive lying around for some time but only recently tried to recover any data from it. It died just after a year of use, out of the blue: no indications from SMART data, or IO slowdowns, or anything else. Just some horrible grinding sounds, which as soon as they started, I forced the computer off.

Now, some years later...

The drive powers on, hums smoothly, and is recognized by the kernel. However, I can't read any data whatsoever from it:

• gsmartcontrol

  unknown device, unable to read data
  

• ddrescue, direct access mode

  0 bytes recovered.
  

  The drive hums smoothly throughout the entire process. About halfway through, a faint scratching sound started, so I pulled the plug. Meanwhile, in kernel land:

• kernel (from ddrescue)

  sd 6:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: 
  Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00
  Buffer I/O error on dev sdc, logical block 0, async page read
  

• gparted

  fsync error on close
  

  (approximately) No partitions are recognized.

First, any recovery tips? Such as, try shaking the drive as though it were a broken TV, stick it in the freezer (or try recovery from a cold environment), or perhaps use some specialized software?

Mainly, I'm surprised by how quickly it failed and that now it runs smoothly. Is it possible the drive is OK, and the circuitry failed? I could try replacing the board below the drive?

Answer 1

Probably nothing you can do yourself. There are a number of services that will try to recover as much of your data as they can. These services come in a wide range of expertize and success. Specific product recommendations are out of scope for this site, but a web search should yield a list for you to research. The low end ones can only do superficial things like replacing boards. The high end ones have professional clean rooms in which they can completely disassemble the disk and either reassemble it replacing parts or directly read the platters.

I have had two past experiences where I needed to call on such professionals, and I can report a 50% success rate. One disk was irrecoverable at all (two different companies agreed), but a later disk (that, as it turns out, I cared a lot more about) was fully recovered.

And the most important lesson to take from this experience is frequent backups are a necessity if you care about your data.