Can’t See the Trees for the Wood

A keen genealogist send us a 300GB hard drive from Devon.  It contained years of research into his family tree and was totally inaccessible. Worse, when he applied power to the drive via an external USB enclosure, he realised the drive wasn’t even spinning.  He was distraught.

When we received the hard drive, we quickly determined that the platter spindle had seized – this occcurred because of a failure in the bearings responsible for keeping rotation smooth.  Once upon a time, this was performed with steel ball bearings – now it’s done using a speck of special NASA style oil – a Fluid Dynamic Bearing.

The bearing had sheared debris internally so was unusable and beyond repair – the entire motor unit was FUBAR (Failed Until Buy A Replacement).

But the thing about hard drive manufacturers is that they don’t build hard drives with the intention of making part replacement easy – these aren’t cars, they are units which are entirely replaced under warranty (with no regard to the final destination of the data).  Typically, the motor is inaccessible without entirely disassembling the internals of the hard drive.

Why is this a big deal? In our family tree enthusiast’s hard drive, there were 3 double-sided platters (the mirror-finish disks holding the data on magnetic substrate surfaces), with 6 read-heads in the stack PLUS metal spacers (to “reduce noise”).  The only way to replace the motor and spindle was to buy a sacrificial donor, and move the entire mechanical contents (except motor and spindle) from the defective hard drive to the donor chassis.

The stack of platters had to be moved with an astonishing degree of accuracy – any rotational movement of more than a handful of microns by any single platter would render the whole data-set unrecoverable.

Why is that hard? The 6 screws holding the platters tight together are also holding the platters to the spindle.  To remove the platters from the bad hard drive, you have to unfasten them.  To successfully transfer platter stacks we use a proprietary technique developed in-house and refined over the course of years.

I’ll spare you the details of the 6-read-head swap, and the lengthy bad sector processing that followed.

Eventually, we recovered everything:

• recorded interviews with far-flung relatives (some now passed away)
• collection of apprenticeship records
• census databases
• certificates for births, deaths and marriages
• family tree databases with accumulated notes and connections
• photographs of tombstones from UK and France
• scans of newspaper clippings
• shipping records from U.S. and Australia
• copies of family trees from other enthusiasts with shared branches
• email archive with many investigative threads

Key fact: the lost data was rescued, the genealogist’s quest to search his own history could continue.