[joe7dust]

I hooked it up with a USB to SATA interface and the disk is spinning but it is not recognized as a drive. Is there anything I can do? I am trying to recover it for a friend it crashed in his computer.

I have heard that there are ways to physically recover like take it apart and remove the circular disk inside. This is something that only NSA or some governmental agency would use though right?

 

[raptor_pa]

No professional data recovery company's can do it, it has to be done in a clean room I do it a couple of times a week although a platter swap is the last attempt.. A bettter start would be here... http://www.techsupportforum.com/f16...rtition-or-files-in-your-computer-194492.html

 

[blah789]

I know much less than raptor_pa in that domain, but from the little i know, usually it goes
1. software (like chkdsk) (if the drive's recognized in software)
2. software (like testdisk, ontrack easy recovery pro, recovermyfiles (or whatever it's named)) (if the drive's recognized in hardware (BIOS))
3. printed circuit board swap (can be done at home, but must be exact same drive revision version - see hddguru forums)
4. platter swap (open drive, take out the platters and put it in another working drive - again drive revision version must match exactly - must be done in clean room (look it up in wikipedia))

there's probably a couple more tries between 2 and 3 (like using specialized software like dd (linux) or the deepspar 3000), but I was trying to introduce the idea of printed circuit board swap (the green board underneath the drive).

 

[raptor_pa]

Pretty much spot on blah... If I may expand a bit more...In your list - before a platter swap is a head swap. platter swaps are really only used in the event of motor failure or spindle seizure, when the platters physically can't spin. If the issue is a head failure or preamp failure, much easier and safer for the data to swap the headstack rather than move the platters. Even with a spindle failure, there are tools that you can torque the platters to try to get them to spin up again long enough to recover The reason being, that particularly in multi platter drives ( where there are 2,3,4, or in some scsi drive up to 10 platters ) the platters must be moved as a unit and cannot be permitted to rotate even a micron, if that happens data alignment and timing go out the window. Add to that the fact that manufacturers have been adding baffles between the platters that are secured to the frame of the drive, which have pretty much made the previous platter tools useless, and platter swaps are the last thing even pros want to try.
Upon re-reading the OPS post, he may be referring to the infamous 'direct read' of the platters. While it is possible to extract data reading individual bits on a spin stand, assembling it into useable data becomes another thing entirely.
The HD controls how data is actually written to the platters - what the mapping of physical sectors is to Logical blocks. that mapping algorithm is part of the drives firmware structure. So even tho you can read individual bits and bytes directly from a platter with the proper gear - it is
a) not cheap LOL
b) unless you have a major reason to try it - not likely to yield reliable results in an acceptable time period.