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DIODE .... hangs by a thread

Thursday, August 23, 2007

How To Open A Seagate FreeAgent Hard Drive In Order To Make Some Kind Of Attempt At Destroying The Potentially Incriminating Data Contained Therein

While I've really quite enjoyed switching to the Mac, the move has definitely led to some serious wastage of time - not only in setting up and acclimating to the new system, but also in having to deal with some unforeseen, unfortunate events.

The most recent such wastage of time, which I'm apparently determined to extend by writing this blog posting, happened as a result of the process of switching (almost) all of my external hard drives from NTFS to HFS+ (the mac filesystem).

In order to do this, I had to move data from drive to drive, so that I could free each one up to be reformatted as HFS+.

Also, files that I normally encrypt with DriveCrypt (my Windows encryption utility) had to be decrypted so that I could re-encrypt them on the Mac (using Disk Utility and sparseimages).

So while I usually have at least two copies of every important file, on different hard drives, I figured it might be OK to briefly chance it with less while reformatting drives.

Oops.

After copying files to a brand new Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard drive that I just purchased on Friday (8/18), I was moving some of the files from it onto another drive when it suddenly started making the click of death.

This, just after I had reformatted the drive with the original files, from NTFS to HFS+ and then back to NTFS (b/c the HFS+ format failed for some reason).

What was on the drive? About 30,000MP3s, some FLACs of my own music that had taken me months to compile, and, of more importance to this blog posting, some personal data - financial stuff, etc. No, there was not any porn on there. All that's safe.

Anyway, I've been through all this before, and so, after verifying that the Seagate could no longer be recognized by the Mac or by Windows, I immediately put it in the freezer.

Meanwhile, I set to work trying to recover data from the reformatted backup. Using GetDataBack for NTFS, a program that has saved my butt in the past, I've been able to locate about 20,000 MP3s ... the only problem is, they're all named with random characters. Like, 012a435d.mp3. Oh well. I'll live. As for the personal data, I already had copied that over to my Mac.

But back to the issue at hand. So I take the Seagate out of the freezer after a few hours and it's still clicking and still can't be recognized by either the Mac or by Windows. I run SpinRite from my old ThinkPad and try to get it to read the drive, but it's not detectable by the BIOS.

So now I have a dead Seagate FreeAgent 500GB hard drive, which incidentally had only cost me $119 at OfficeMax. It was still returnable/exchangeable, since I'd just bought it a few days prior ... but how to return it when there's potentially sensitive information on there, especially since I've heard horror stories about data left on returned hard drives?

A little research suggested that, short of pulverizing or melting the platters in the hard disk, it would be difficult to completely erase the data on a drive without actually writing it over. A degausser might do it ... but that seemed to be out of the question given the expense and waiting time obtaining one would entail. Even so, with a decent magnet and access to the actual platters, you can apparently make it fairly difficult for anyone to get the data back without using advanced techniques.

So ...

Here's the Seagate FreeAgent 500. Note the plastic stand, which isn't meant to be detached and which prevents these drives from being stackable:

It turns out that the stand and the rest of the drive casing are pretty much a closed unit. There are no visible screws, or even hidden ones, and there's no obvious way to open the casing.

Flipping the unit upside down, the bottom cover can be pried off with a screwdriver and removed:

Finally, some screws! One thing's for sure, this is not your typical external hard drive enclosure.


At last some familiar looking connections - power supply, data, glowbar power:

The wires are detached and the board is removed:

Finally the last of the screws that keep the bottom part on:

After removing the last part of the stand, the casing itself was still shut tight as a clam.

It took several screwdriver initiatives to pry the thing open, but that was the only way to go about it. It was almost certainly designed to be shut once and never opened again. The thing made a horrific cracking sound as it opened, though the plastic tabs inside were intact.


The metal drive casing is removed from the plastic cover, revealing:

Peeling back the metal foil and pulling the wire cover off:

On the side, these rubber bumpers are cute but need to come off:

They appear to have been affixed with some kind of space-age superadhesive ... but they do pry off eventually, showing these cylindrical protruding screws, which are also kind of cute:

After removing those screws, the metal casing can be pried off (there's a lot of prying going on here).

VOILA! The hard drive itself! It's a Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM drive.

Now, it's time to get to the real work!

But wait ... what's this?
AAAGH!!! Torx!!!

It's time to go to ... Radio Shack!

It's also time to get some magnets!

These particular magnets have "hundreds of uses around the home":

Which probably means they're not very strong ... however these mamas are the rare-earth kind, whatever that means ... all I know is that all the packages were stuck together and stuck to everything else around them like the pages of a favorite magazine:

I probably should have gotten a bunch, since they were only like $1.99 each, but oh well.

OK ... now, with the Torx 'driver, the screws around the edges of the drive can be removed, and finally the mysterious, forbidden, warranty-breaking screw can be lustily unfastened:

to reveal the beauty of the promised land (look, I've never seen the inside of a hard drive before):


Now it's time to make my lame attempt at getting rid of the data on there:

OK, that looks kinda silly. I admit it. This is gonna look even more silly:

Yep, that's the rare-earth magnet, under my thumb. I will say though, that I had to hold it there - letting it go meant that it would fly across the drive and rest on the center disk or the other magnets.

Not feeling satisfied with this weak appearing methodology, I set about to further dismantle this mofo:

Just look at those tasty platters ...

De-torxing the top rim allowed the removal of the platters, and their subsequent scraping via Phillips-head screwdriver.

I will say, those are some pretty hefty platters. I had no idea. They're solid metal and feel good in the hand. They're probably also excellent to use as coasters or in some art project.

And that's it. That's all I could think of doing. That should be enough, right? I mean c'mon. I didn't have anything THAT spectacular on there. But I just didn't want to feel nauseated thinking about someone getting hold of anything that might be there ...

So I put everything back together, which went well except there was one extra screw and also when I tried to snap it all back together I managed then to break one of the tabs ... GREAT. So now it won't close properly:


Oh well. I took it back to OfficeMax and exchanged it for a new drive. They were actually pretty nice about it. Probably someone at Seagate will look at the drive and go, W..T..F??

And before you take this posting as another example of my admittedly shaky moral fortitude, I would say in my defense that the drive did fail just a few days after I bought it and was completely unreadable, so it had to go back to Seagate anyway - but since my data was on there, the only way to get at it before returning it was to open the drive and access the platters. Right?

Now ... back to trying to recover 30,000 MP3s ...

Boy writing this was a good use of my time ...

23 Comments:

  • THx you help me a lot I am working on a smaller case for my seagate 250 :)

    By Blogger Adante, at 12:01 AM  

  • Thanks buddy, for sharing your experience & your guidelines to open the f****** Seagate hard disk & sharing the retriving softwares.

    I had same problem as I deleted all my laptop files to format it & transfer it to new free agent hard drive which broken within a week.

    I opened it but I am not able to retrive my data from har disk. Now I will try the software you suggested to retrive the data from the laptop, which is still not formatted & might have the files That I deleted from recycle bin.

    Suggest some more guidlines to retrive the data from the hardisk.

    Cheers!

    By Blogger Unknown, at 12:24 PM  

  • Surely a hammer would have been quicker once you got the drive out :)

    I have a similar problem, also have recently gone to Mac from windows.

    http://intepid.com/2007-12-28/23.28/

    By Blogger intepid, at 5:27 PM  

  • Thanks for sharing the "surgery".
    Did the same, hoping to find the loose stuff, plug the ext hd (almost naked) in in a different computer and still couldn't get it to be recognized. Do you have any suggestions how to recover the data other than sending it back to seagate (they want between $700 to $2400 WTF...)? Thanks a million for helping!

    By Blogger Unknown, at 4:06 PM  

  • What happened to me was the usb connector in the back of the base got pushed inside. Thanks for the details about opening the base, i didnt want to break it and void my warranty. I talked to tech support in india and they were no use. So what i will do is use those connectors in my friends external casing and try to recover my data before sending it back. Thanks for helping me open it.

    By Blogger Unknown, at 6:20 PM  

  • Thanks for sharing your experience. I was tempted to pick up one of these for the sake of the integrated power adapter on the base, as you know, most the DIY enclosure comes with this huge separated adapter.

    By Blogger FelixLee, at 10:44 AM  

  • Hey, thanks so much. The usb interface was jangling around uselessly within the drive and I needed to open it so I could jury rig it to get my data off. Appreciate everything!

    By Blogger Unknown, at 12:42 PM  

  • thank you for the post and pictures. It helped me initiate opening up my Freeagent 320. I had been using it for a few weeks via usb2.0 on my sawtooth g4 mac. Worked great, but rather slow in access time.
    I had my Seritek 1s2 SATA pci card hanging around, waiting to be installed, so i took out my scsi card in the sawtooth and put that baby in.
    The case did look formidable at first. But looking through your pictures made it look very do-able.
    It was actually a very straight forward proceedure and no problems at all, nothing cracked, scratched or busted/lost. I know have a beautiful USB2.0 controller/case and the seagate 320 drive in my mac internally, speeding along. Since these Freeagent drives are such a deal..I may have to get a few more. I want to try to find the pro with the Firewire interface, then I can drop a drive in there and use it with my Pismo. Seagate obviously wanted a product designed to be sleek and ergonomic, but they also made it almost bulletproof, but there is a way! Thanks again! Anyone do anything creative with that light strip that came in the Case???

    By Blogger freQazoidiac, at 12:07 PM  

  • Great Guide!! thanks very much!!!

    By Blogger Unknown, at 6:05 AM  

  • I have a Seagate 1TB. It occasionally fails to show up on the Mac, most often when I have failed to "put it away" nicely (that is I simply yanked the cord). Solution: connect it to my corporate laptop (a T-Series running XP) and use the disk utilities to "recognise" the Seagate. The Seagate then realises it's still loved and reappears on the Mac desktop.

    By Blogger Peter Farrell-Vinay, at 2:50 PM  

  • Hey thanks for this step by step.
    Someone stepped on my usb cable and broke the surface mount (wtf? strong?!?) connector off the board.
    So I had to crack open my seapgate and place it in an old maxtor case.

    Anyways, cheers
    Denford.

    By Blogger Unknown, at 2:19 PM  

  • Can someone guide me into opening the freeagent desk 1 tb (silver case)

    By Blogger sid, at 7:53 AM  

  • Thank you very much for the guidance. I have managed to save my data putting the broken contacts back together nearly with bare hands.

    By Blogger Unknown, at 5:08 PM  

  • thanks a lot for this guideline
    I had a problem accessing my data (connection was continously lost making practically impossible to retrieve the data)

    Obviously the drive waited to be almost full before deciding to deny connection...

    suspecting an electrical problem or external interface malfunction 'cause sometimes i was able to access the data (my model 'was' a 500 gb with both usb and esata connection...well, esata never worked) I had the intention to open it but no "courage" to actually do it...

    you guide has cleared my doubts

    to be said that I was far less delicate than you when opening that terrible 'clam': i've destroyed everything and plastic pieces have flown throughout the whole room (also one of my hand complained a little about that kind of work...)

    But the satisfaction to recover the hd, put it in a 3,5 inch free slot in my case and have the pleasure to finally retrieve all my stuff (earning an additional working hd, too) was well worth it: half an hour of sweat and some little swearing also

    thanks again

    ps
    the first thing I've done when i accessed the hd was to change his name and drive letter...don' want to never see again that d*mned "Freeagent Drive (M):" in my life...

    By Blogger Luke, at 6:32 AM  

  • thanks a lot for this guideline
    I had a problem accessing my data (connection was continously lost making practically impossible to retrieve the data)

    Obviously the drive waited to be almost full before deciding to deny connection...

    suspecting an electrical problem or external interface malfunction 'cause sometimes i was able to access the data (my model 'was' a 500 gb with both usb and esata connection...well, esata never worked) I had the intention to open it but no "courage" to actually do it...

    you guide has cleared my doubts

    to be said that I was far less delicate than you when opening that terrible 'clam': i've destroyed everything and plastic pieces have flown throughout the whole room (also one of my hand complained a little about that kind of work...)

    But the satisfaction to recover the hd, put it in a 3,5 inch free slot in my case and have the pleasure to finally retrieve all my stuff (earning an additional working hd, too) was well worth it: half an hour of sweat and some little swearing also

    thanks again

    ps
    the first thing I've done when i accessed the hd was to change his name and drive letter...don' want to never see again that d*mned "Freeagent Drive (M):" in my life...

    By Blogger Luke, at 6:32 AM  

  • I have a freeagent desktop that doesn't spin up when connected to usb... I can still use it as an internal drive?

    By Blogger humberto, at 7:02 PM  

  • thanks for the post-mortem. I have... had one of those as well, but I just bought a Drobo and wanted to put the bare drive in it after I had copied my data off. What an annoying design! I hacked the thing open, and now the drive is contentedly purring away in a redundant array.

    And for the poster who made a comment about an integrated power supply - no, actually, this thing ALSO comes with an AC adapter, a rather large one. Also, the plug on the back is a mini USB, which always seemed a little unstable.

    It's a shame to just destroy the enclosure, but oh, well. I scavenged the light strip to try to do something cool with - anyone know how much power it wants?

    By Blogger stephan.com, at 9:05 PM  

  • This is a really excellent post, my friend.

    I was sitting here looking at my spare freeagent drive and wondering what the hell was in it. By the size and shape you already know that there is a bunch of useless plastic and parts that most likely inflate the prices of these external drives to begin with.

    Your post was really useful and I found some of your sarcasm quite humorous at times..... because you verbalize what we are all thinking about this piece of crap device.

    Keep up the good work.

    Graham
    http://grahamslam.blogspot.com

    By Blogger Graham, at 1:30 PM  

  • It's a shame that you probably have destroyed a perfectly good hard drive. However, these older drives do have bios recognition issues and bios hangs. The other issue with these drives is an issue where the drive has been formated or erased completely and the (Windows) OS does not recognise the drive. I have resolved this issue by using an initializing program with either a newer live linux cd, downloadable via internet, and initializing the external disk and formating it to NTFS. It should now be recognizable by windows. About wiping the contents of your disks, if you have a working disk, linux has a "dd" program that you can use to zero out the drives or use random write to kill all of you sensitive data.

    By Blogger PhenomNatura, at 8:59 PM  

  • Its interesting to see inside the poor design, zero ventilation, zero heatsinking...what was this harddrive company thinking...

    By Blogger Fwaaa, at 8:24 PM  

  • Amazing work, thank you, it was very useful for me as I've upgraded my 500GB disk to 1TB.

    However, the work you've done is pretty unnecessary past the point where you remove the top cover of the HDD.

    Any of the following would render your data permanently irrecoverable:

    -free spin of the platters
    - scratching the surface with a pointy tool

    Furthermore, as far as I know, any HDD with broken seal (top sticker that you have pierced to remove a screw) will not be reprocessed to be reselled as "remanufactured".

    Anyways, thanks again for the article.

    By Blogger Unknown, at 3:08 PM  

  • Thanks for your guide! It helped immensely trying to repurpose the drive for an internal.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 12:57 PM  

  • Note: Tuxera has software that allows NTFS hard drives to run on an Apple product.

    http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/

    Their website states the following:

    "Mac OS X does not support writing to Microsoft Windows formatted NTFS volumes out-of-the box. The solution is here. Tuxera NTFS for Mac is our commercial read/write NTFS software for Mac users. Tuxera NTFS for Mac delivers the fastest NTFS data transfer speeds you can have on Mac while protecting your data with its new, smart caching layer."

    I purchased this years ago. It came with 3 licenses. Its worked perfect for years with no problems and all updates for new iOS operating systems were free.

    By Blogger Tron, at 1:45 PM  

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