Fire Damaged Hard Drive

Wow that's a tough project, even professionals don't like working on fire damaged drives.

Not really my area of expertise but I know a few things that will assist.

Where the circuit board is melted/damaged you will need to get a working board from the same make/model hard drive, and if possible the same batch. I'm not sure how to determine batches but think it has something to do with the serial number.

If the drive still spools up then you may get lucky with just that. If the drive has problems internally you are looking at a whole new ball game, disassembling hard drives and moving platters etc into a new case is not a simple matter, hence the hefty price tag that professionals charge.

Good luck!

Where the circuit board is melted/damaged you will need to get a working board from the same make/model hard drive, and if possible the same batch. I'm not sure how to determine batches but think it has something to do with the serial number.

Unfortunately the above is accurate only for rather old drives, anything manufactured in the last - say - 10 years or so have some data in a flash rom on the board, so besides finding the right board, you need to "transplant" the rom from the old board to the new one.
The chip contains "adaptive data" written in the factory that "couple" the board with the actual drive, I believe there are tools (PC-3000) that can rebuild the contents and reprogram those chips, but some data needs to be anyway extracted from the old chip.
We are talking here anyway of a tool that costs between 5 and 12 thousands US dollars (it depends on where you live).
Transplanting a chip is however not particularly difficult, if you have decent soldering tools, a firm hand and some dexterity.

If the drive still spools up then you may get lucky with just that. If the drive has problems internally you are looking at a whole new ball game, disassembling hard drives and moving platters etc into a new case is not a simple matter, hence the hefty price tag that professionals charge.

Maybe even worse, you would need besides a "clean room" (that you can build yourself) some specialized tools, namely a platters holder/clamp and a head comb specific for the drive model, while cheaper than the PC-3000, I believe with a few hundred dollars they can be obtained, it is something that needs LOTS of practice, like - I mean - you will need 20-30 identical disks[1] (that you will likely ruin in the process) to test the procedure at least 10 times before putting your hands on a "real" disk with a minimum of confidence.

In other words, a board swap (and chip transplant) is doable with a little care, simply forget to be able to open a disk and transplant platters or change heads without the proper tools and a previous specific training and lots of exercise.

jaclaz

[1] Please note how "for fun" you can exercise on dead disks, but in order to make sure that you can actually transplant platters or change heads you need perfectly working disks, otherwise you won't be able to understand if it worked, this alone will put you out of another (say) 30x50=1500 US$

Maybe even worse, you would need besides a "clean room" (that you can build yourself) some specialized tools, namely a platters holder/clamp and a head comb specific for the drive model, while cheaper than the PC-3000, I believe with a few hundred dollars they can be obtained, it is something that needs LOTS of practice, like - I mean - you will need 20-30 identical disks[1] (that you will likely ruin in the process) to test the procedure at least 10 times before putting your hands on a "real" disk with a minimum of confidence.

In other words, a board swap (and chip transplant) is doable with a little care, simply forget to be able to open a disk and transplant platters or change heads without the proper tools and a previous specific training and lots of exercise.

jaclaz

Not really - we used to open up disks all the time outside of clean rooms and they would usually run for weeks - try it with an old drive. To be fair this was in a lab environment that was reasonably clean but very far removed from a clean room. Again heads etc can be swapped without the relevant tools - it is just a very fiddly job - ISTR recently a company advertising on here selling "kits" to do head and platter swaps on different drive types - maybe an email to them to see if you can get one for a spcific common drive type and make sure they are reference in any project.

The OP is not doing this commercially but for a project - so if it works on a disk it works and he just needs a caveat to say "don't try this at home/work" ).

The biggest issue I would suggest is at what temp has the drive been cooked - too hot and the platters will lose their ability to hold magnetic data (curie point) and you can swap all you want but you wont get any data back.

Not really - we used to open up disks all the time outside of clean rooms and they would usually run for weeks - try it with an old drive. To be fair this was in a lab environment that was reasonably clean but very far removed from a clean room.

Sure, still making a poor man's one is not difficult and inexpensive or nearly inexpensive.
See
http//www.forensicfocus.com/Forums/viewtopic/p=6532519/#6532519

I put "clean room" between quotes as - bar a handful firms - whenever you read "we have a clean room" on the site of a data recovery firm, they don' t mean really a "clean room" in the sense of white chamber, all they have is a (reasonably clean) lab room with a laminar flow bench.

Changing a head without using a comb, but rather a set of cutouts from medicine blisters is doable (multiplying by - say - 5x the amount of dexterity needed) but I really doubt that a platter transplant can be done without appropriate "clamps" (which of course can also be home made, maybe 3D printed) in the case of multi-platter disks, i.e. 99.99% of disk drives in use.

jaclaz

I am a senior who's doing a special topics project on recovering data off of a hard drive that has been damaged by fire. If anyone has procedures or resources about how to go about repairing or recovering data off of fire damaged hard drives it would help a lot. So far, most of what I've been able to find are companies that'll do all the work for me for a price. The whole point of the project is for me to do all the work on my own. Any information about disassembling, cleaning or replacing hard drive parts would be useful too.

All depends on how much the damage is like with any other damage, compare slightly smoke damaged vs crisp black (as in deliberately sabotaged in an incident i saw at a partner organisation that went pretty much nowhere).

Platter drives probably lasts longer than SSDs/Memory sticks that's just surface mounted electronics with a lower point of melting/flammability, and there isn't much replacing parts when it comes to those.

If this is a business idea, i'd suggest finding something more fruitful. There are indicators that IT is moving away from platters drives - even though it wont happen overnight i wouldn't make a career out of it right now.

SWGDE has a best practices paper for Handling Damaged Hard Drives

https://www.swgde.org/documents

SWGDE has a best practices paper for Handling Damaged Hard Drives

https://www.swgde.org/documents

Sure, but essentially that provides just a couple of hints on how to package the media and send it to a (qualified) technician

4.3 Fire Damage
If a hard drive was in a fire that was extinguished with water, package the drive in anti-static bag with silica gel packs and ensure the drive is protected on all sides by at least 3 inches of padding.
Once the exhibit is packaged, ship as soon as possible and notify the technician responsible for
media recovery.
If a hard drive was in a fire that was extinguished on its own and/or reached a temperature of
150° Fahrenheit or more then DO NOT power-on the drive.

Which - more or less - corresponds to "common sense".

jaclaz