Recovering a deep-sixed disk drive

ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
A fellow boat owner in the marina here managed to drop his laptop into 6m of water a few days ago. It was in the sea for only 10 minutes or so before another yachtie dived in and fetched it out. Stupidly he just dried it out and then tried to power on, not surprisingly nothing worked.

He's just arrived in the marina here so the laptop has come to me. I opened the laptop and it's trashed, the insides are covered in verdigris and what looks like burned out PCB tracks. The drive was pretty well protected but when I got that out it was also clearly water damaged. I plugged it into my portable caddy and it spins but it's not recognised by my laptop.

Currently it's soaking in a bucket of fresh water, my intention is to try to leech the salt out of it. Then I plan to leave it drying for a few days to remove all traces of water before plugging it in again to see what happens. I don't have a lot of hope and I've never tried this before but the guy has two years of sailing pictures on there and no backup (why am I not surprised?) so it's worth a crack.

Has anyone else been down a similar road and have any advice? I've recovered a mobile phone that was deep-sized in the marina here, but I got that out myself, stripped out the battery and dunked that in fresh water for a day. After drying out and spraying with WD40 to remove all the water it worked (and is still working as far as I know). I'm not sure I want to spray WD40 into a hard disk drive though, what do you think?

I'll let you know either way whether this radical last-ditch approach works, I'll be mightily impressed if it does!

:dots:
 
Pagey

Pagey

Bright Spark
I imagine it's a mechanical HDD, not an SSD, which is going to make things a load more complicated and expensive.

IF you're lucky and water hasn't got into the drive, i'd suggest getting an exact drive as the one that is damaged, and swap over the electronics and see if that helps, otherwise:

HDD's aren't hermetically sealed, so that wretched sea water has mow got into all the mechanism and it's probably doing untold damage. To be totally frank there isn't anything YOU can do for it, but there are plenty of data recovery companies about, but they can be bloody expensive. Unless the air inside has actually managed to keep the water out, but the turning on of the laptop whilst wet has probably severely damaged the controller.

I personally would go for the recovery option and don't attempt to run the drive anymore as the spinning could possibly destroy the data on the drive.

Not sure if it's what you want to hear though.
 
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mishra

mishra

Rising Star
A perfect method of drying a hard drive is to put it in the jar filled with rice for a week. Rice will suck any moist from the drive. But if has been already started and it seem dead I think data recovery company is your only option.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Those who think us yachties are rich should think again. A boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money, so there was no way my friend could afford a data recovery company.

And in the end he didn't need to, I've recovered all his data! The disk did look badly water damaged but I guess the innards had been largely protected (even though that laptop was in about 6m for a good 10 minutes). I had it submerged in a bucket of fresh water for about 2 hours and I agitated it several times and drained it and re-submerged it. Then it sat in the warmest place on the boat, but not in direct sunlight. It's about about 28deg C here today so after about 5 hours it looked and felt pretty dry.

I hooked it up to my magic SATA bridge, powered it up and - nothing. I could hear that it was running ok which is more than it did last time so I left it to warm under power. About 10 minutes later Windows detected it and I was able to copy all the data off. Result!

Ubuysa is now a very happy bunny. And so is my friend!
 
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W

Wozza63

Biblical Poster
Great to hear, although I wouldn't recommend continuing to use the drive. It's lucky that it worked long enough for you to get the data from it. Oh and make sure your friend backs up everything important. Which reminds me, that I should probably do the same.
 
SpyderTracks

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
ubuysa said:
Those who think us yachties are rich should think again. A boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money, so there was no way my friend could afford a data recovery company.

And in the end he didn't need to, I've recovered all his data! The disk did look badly water damaged but I guess the innards had been largely protected (even though that laptop was in about 6m for a good 10 minutes). I had it submerged in a bucket of fresh water for about 2 hours and I agitated it several times and drained it and re-submerged it. Then it sat in the warmest place on the boat, but not in direct sunlight. It's about about 28deg C here today so after about 5 hours it looked and felt pretty dry.

I hooked it up to my magic SATA bridge, powered it up and - nothing. I could hear that it was running ok which is more than it did last time so I left it to warm under power. About 10 minutes later Windows detected it and I was able to copy all the data off. Result!

Ubuysa is now a very happy bunny. And so is my friend!
Click to expand...

That's impressive... I wouldn't have tried until reading this.
 
ubuysa

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Some photos...

The first is the disk drive soaking in a bucket of fresh water. I agitated it regularly and lifted it out and drained it a few times, all to get the salt out. The salt is the problem, it's conductive, so washing anything electronic that's been in the sea in fresh water is a good way to get the salt out. Drying in rice is also a good tip from others on here, I have done that in the past but with summer upon us here on Crete now it's not needed. :cool:

The second (sorry it's out of focus a bit - I was getting excited at this point) is the drive attached to my magic bridge and copying. I've copied everything off the drive now, and backed it up to an external drive too. That magic bridge is worth it's weight in gold, it takes both SATA and IDE drives, it's paid for itself a thousand times over!

The disk drive itself is now of course scrap, you'd really have to believe in the tooth fairy and leprechauns to keep using it! It does show that washing in fresh water is worth a try, I've saved a mobile phone by this method too.

BTW. In case you're wondering, the little grey MiFi is sitting on a USB powered fan to keep it cool. I discovered that it gets pretty hot here in the summer and it starts to drop out when it gets hot. The fan solves that problem. And yes, my chart table is a bit of a mess, time for a clean up I think? My Optimus IV could do with a clean too.........
 
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