data recovery tips: laptop hard drive does not spin contact us: http://www.hddrecovery.ca/contact-us/ for data recovery call us: 1.855.366.4232 In this video we are helping one of our partners to recovery data from an older Toshiba GAS model hard drive. To those who are “in the know” GAS and GAX generation of Toshiba 2.5” hard drives had a huge bearing failure rate. Due to extensive heat, bearings would get shot, and the drive loses its ability to rotate. Another words the motor is seized. Symptom Hard drive does not begin spinning up when power goes to it. You may be able to hear some sounds from the drive, but it will not even begin to spin for a moment. Dignostics Diagnostics on non-spinning hard drives can be done fairly easily, even without specialized equipment. All you have to do is LISTEN. Power on the drive and put your ear next to it. If your hard drive does not spin up, there are only a handful of reasons behind it. 1. Hard drive has a problem with power delivery (PCB). In this situation there will be absolutely no sounds coming from the hard drive when you power it on. 2. Heads could be stuck on the platter surface. Depending on the manufacturer and the model of the drive you would be able to head slight beeping, buzzing, and pulsing from the drive without any spinning upon power up. This problem would usually occur if you dropped your drive when it was not plugged in. Impact would force heads to “jump off” the parking ramp onto non-spinning disk surface. in order to recover data in such case we would need to carefully relocate heads into their native position without causing any damaged to the disk surface nor heads. 3. Seized spindle or failed bearing assembly - On 3,5” hard drives due to weight of the disks heavy impact can cause the spindle to bend. But on 2.5” hard drives bearings fail usually due to overheating. Dynamic fluid inside the bearing can solidify due to heat, but that problem in mainly common on certain brands, and models of hard drives. One of these hard drives are shown in this video today. Solution In order to get the drive to a working condition again, we would need to use a donor chassis from another hard drive of the same architecture, and swap out all of the guts from our failed device into the donor. In this video we will perform this data recovery procedure with less that 5$ worth of materials. Yes, you will need access to a clean room or a laminar flow bench. Yes, you will need to have some sort of imaging equipment. No, you will not need “specialized” tools to do the platter swap on the drive like this. Recovery After the transplant is done, and the drive is sealed we have to begin the imaging process. Once the image is obtained, we use it to save customers data onto a new reliable hard drive