Roger Howorth

Apparently, half of failed hard disks can be fixed simply by re-flashing the drives' firmware. Better still, most of the other 50 percent can be fixed by gently banging them once or twice against a wall. I learned this recently during a fascinating talk with someone who worked for an enterprise storage vendor.

You see, like most companies that sell hard disks for a high price, the vendor offers an automated maintenance service to its customers. When a customer's hard drive fails, or even looks like it might soon fail, the disk array hardware detects it and sends a message to the vendor. The vendor then orders a replacement, delivers it directly to the customer, and collects the dud.

My pal informed me that his company then launches into some sort of forensic examination of the failed drives to investigate what's wrong. Obviously his company has an interest in knowing why these drives fail ð perhaps it will be able to negotiate suitable compensation from the hard disk manufacturer, or possibly even improve its own product design.

It should be said that this particular vendor is one of those that takes hard disks from various sources ð such as Seagate, for example ð and replaces the drives' original firmware with its own.

The tale also makes me wonder whether hard disk firmware is flakey, or if simply replacing it removes the tendency to lock up.

And then, as we all know, there are lies, damned lies and statistics, and I'm sure the figures mentioned were from rough estimates rather than from proper research. However, the thrust of the argument is quite interesting. Particularly if, like me, you have recently lost data thanks to a hard disk crash.

Now I can find a wall to hit a drive against, but getting software to update hard disk firmware is a little more difficult. Obtaining suitable firmware is even more tricky.

Of course, all this also begs the question ð which I ask without a shred of malice: what on earth do the various data recovery firms do in order to fix broken hard disks?

You know the sort of firms ð you send them a broken disk, they fiddle around with it for a day and send it back with an invoice for £2,000. Surely they are not simply banging disks against a wall, and if that fails flashing the firmware?

I'd prefer to think they do something that involves a screwdriver. After all, I've heard tales of desperate people dismantling and reassembling their own hard disks ð without using a clean room ð with some degree of success.

But whatever these specialists are doing, I'd be surprised if they were spending more than a few hours on each job even though they are charging £2,000.

This question might seem academic today, but the next time one of your family, or even a senior manager at the office, suffers a disk crash, wouldn't it be nice if it could be fixed just by tapping an in-house resource?

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