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We recently went through a hurricane and our server room became flooded. Hooray for insurance. Anyway, I need to save as much data off one of the hard drives as possible. Yes, it was submerged for the better part of two days.
Do I need to open the drive and make sure it’s flood-water free? Should I remove the board on bottom and dry out the foam? What all do I need.
Any suggestions would be helpful.
Thanks in advance!
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http://www.storagesearch.com/disklabs-art3-floods.html
Do NOT attempt to recover the data
yourself. This will do more damage to
your data and makes it more difficult
to recover when it eventually gets to
a data recovery specialist.When hard disk drives get wet, the
‘heads’ can get stuck to the platters.
When the hard drive is powered up in
this state the disk tries to spin up
and the heads literally get ripped off
causing damage to the platters – the
place where all the data is stored. 2
– Do NOT DRY the hard disk drive out. Although this may seem paradoxical -
this will nearly always destroy the
platter of the hard disk thus making
your data irretrievable.When hard disk drives get wet then dry
out, there is nearly always a residue
of contaminant left on the platters
and heads. Any residue (including a
piece of dust), causes physical
degradation of the hard disk’s
platters and loses more data. 3 – DO
keep the hard disk WET. Ideally, keep
the hard disk drive in a sealed
container to keep the hard disk drive
wet. This stops the hard disk drive
corroding and allows the technical
staff at the recovery company to clean
and dry the platters correctly with
minimum damage to the platter
surfaces.Normally, Disklabs Data Recovery
charges a premium for water damaged
hard disk drives, however, this
additional charge for the cleaning and
drying out of the hard disk drive has
been waivered for the victims of the
latest flooding events.
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