DEAD MAXTOR! HELP!

[doriricci]

Two year old son played hopscotch with brand new Maxtor 3200 200 GB
external HD, recently loaded with all files and backups from my hp
pavilion zd8000 laptop, including precious pictures and movies.

Laptop recently formatted and OS reinstalled, due to numerous
irreparable conflicts from my 8 year old downloading video trials!

I guess I should have backed up my back up.

When it fell off the table, it fell onto the usb connector, which is
now 1/4 inch recessed (crammed) into the body of Drive. I know this, as
I bought 2 external Maxtors - one for each laptop, and the other is
seated higher.

Besides selling my children to gypsies to pay for tech repair, is there
anything I can to to make Drive operable again? Or if not, is it
possible to recover my backups?

Case does not appear to want to open easily.

Needy nose pliers do not appear to want to pull up recessed center
plastic post of usb female.

I do not appear to have the intelligence to hack it, even though I
recently repaired a faulty switch on my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer that I
was told needed replacement by an ahem, "certified technician",
....and freed up a frozen coffee grinder slated for the dump by my
husband.
I brag not that I was able to repair them on my own and saved some
bucks, but that I managed not to electrocute myself on either
uneducated fact finding mission.

I appreciate any relevant feedback about repairing USB port on my
recalictrant drive.

 

[Rod Speed]

(e-mail address removed) wrote

Two year old son played hopscotch with brand new Maxtor 3200 200
GB external HD, recently loaded with all files and backups from my hp
pavilion zd8000 laptop, including precious pictures and movies.

Time for a retrospective abortion |-)

Laptop recently formatted and OS reinstalled, due to numerous
irreparable conflicts from my 8 year old downloading video trials!

Time the plug was pulled on him too.

I guess I should have backed up my back up.

Yeah, you could say that, specially with such feral kids rampaging around.

When it fell off the table, it fell onto the usb connector,
which is now 1/4 inch recessed (crammed) into the body
of Drive. I know this, as I bought 2 external Maxtors -
one for each laptop, and the other is seated higher.

Besides selling my children to gypsies to pay for tech repair,

Better to flog them to those pathetic wretches that
have to adopt kids from South America or SE Asia now.

is there anything I can to to make Drive operable again?

It shouldnt be too hard to fix the USB connector
if you can work out how to get inside the housing.
Getting insideisnt trivial with some housings tho.

Or if not, is it possible to recover my backups?

Really depends on how badly the drives got damaged.

Case does not appear to want to open easily.

The smelly fella can likely tell you how to get inside.

Needy nose pliers do not appear to want to pull
up recessed center plastic post of usb female.

Is it just the center plastic post thats moved back ?
You may need to have a whole new socket soldered
on. That isnt necesarily going to cost much.

I do not appear to have the intelligence to hack it, even though I
recently repaired a faulty switch on my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer that I
was told needed replacement by an ahem, "certified technician", ...and
freed up a frozen coffee grinder slated for the dump by my husband.
I brag not that I was able to repair them on my own and saved
some bucks, but that I managed not to electrocute myself on
either uneducated fact finding mission.

It isnt that hard to replace the USB connector if you can solder.

I appreciate any relevant feedback about
repairing USB port on my recalictrant drive.

Its a bit hard to visualise what its like now. Hard to see how you
could have just rammed the center plastic post of the usb female
back into the connector by it falling on that, more likely its driven
the entire connector back into the housing. Can you post a pic easily ?

 

[dr]

Time for a retrospective abortion |-)
OUch!

Time the plug was pulled on him too.

Did, no givey passwordy on reformatted laptop...

It shouldnt be too hard to fix the USB connector
if you can work out how to get inside the housing.
Getting insideisnt trivial with some housings tho.

yeah, looks like a b...

Is it just the center plastic post thats moved back ?
You may need to have a whole new socket soldered
on. That isnt necesarily going to cost much.
It isnt that hard to replace the USB connector if you can solder.

Me can solder. (see large solder drip scar on thigh, in the shape of
Jesus...)

Its a bit hard to visualise what its like now. Hard to see how you
could have just rammed the center plastic post of the usb female
back into the connector by it falling on that, more likely its driven
the entire connector back into the housing. Can you post a pic easily ?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gigiandme/219544373/

Thanks!

 

[dr]

Time for a retrospective abortion |-)
OUch!

Time the plug was pulled on him too.

Did, no givey passwordy on reformatted laptop...

It shouldnt be too hard to fix the USB connector
if you can work out how to get inside the housing.
Getting insideisnt trivial with some housings tho.

yeah, looks like a b...

Is it just the center plastic post thats moved back ?
You may need to have a whole new socket soldered
on. That isnt necesarily going to cost much.
It isnt that hard to replace the USB connector if you can solder.

Me can solder. (see large solder drip scar on thigh, in the shape of
Jesus...)

Its a bit hard to visualise what its like now. Hard to see how you
could have just rammed the center plastic post of the usb female
back into the connector by it falling on that, more likely its driven
the entire connector back into the housing. Can you post a pic easily ?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gigiandme/219544373/

Thanks!

 

[Rod Speed]

OUch!

Not necessarily, just sedate him first.

Did, no givey passwordy on reformatted laptop...

Can be a problem with laptop hard drives, very secure passwording.

yeah, looks like a b...

The smelly fella should be able to tell you how, he hasnt
showed up yet. He doesnt appear to read here every day.

Me can solder. (see large solder drip scar on thigh, in the shape of Jesus...)

OK, it'll be pretty trivial to replace then.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gigiandme/219544373/

Yeah, looks like its just the post thats been moved
back, the shell appears to be in the same place.

Surprising with it recessed like it is already that it managed to hit that.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Two year old son played hopscotch with brand new Maxtor 3200 200 GB
external HD, recently loaded with all files and backups from my hp
pavilion zd8000 laptop, including precious pictures and movies.

Laptop recently formatted and OS reinstalled, due to numerous
irreparable conflicts from my 8 year old downloading video trials!

I guess I should have backed up my back up.

When it fell off the table, it fell onto the usb connector, which is
now 1/4 inch recessed (crammed) into the body of Drive. I know this, as
I bought 2 external Maxtors - one for each laptop, and the other is
seated higher.

Besides selling my children to gypsies to pay for tech repair, is there
anything I can to to make Drive operable again? Or if not, is it
possible to recover my backups?

Case does not appear to want to open easily.

Needy nose pliers do not appear to want to pull up recessed center
plastic post of usb female.

I do not appear to have the intelligence to hack it, even though I
recently repaired a faulty switch on my Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer that I
was told needed replacement by an ahem, "certified technician",
...and freed up a frozen coffee grinder slated for the dump by my
husband.
I brag not that I was able to repair them on my own and saved some
bucks, but that I managed not to electrocute myself on either
uneducated fact finding mission.

I appreciate any relevant feedback about repairing USB port on my
recalictrant drive.

I would not try the USB port. That may just kill the drive for good
if any of the enclosures electronics was damaaged. With the force
you describe the drive may well have shifted in the enclosure and
damaaged/shoretened things.

Best option is to remove the drive altogether and see whether it
comes up when mounted normally in a computer. If it does not or
produces strange sounds or errors, power it off immediately.
In the second case, professional data recovery is likely your
only chance.

Also serves to show that one baackup is not enough. Usual
system's administrators wisdom is two rotating backups
and the roiginal, then add another to the rotation to feel save.

What you had was just one original and no backup at all. Sorry,
but that is asking for trouble.

Arno

 

[Fabien LE LEZ]

Also serves to show that one baackup is not enough.

As far as I understand, the OP volontarily destroyed the data on the
main disk. That means, she decided to get into a state where she has
only one copy of the data, and thus no backup.

In other words, you must have at least two copies of the data at any
time.
If by accident one copy is destroyed, the first thing to do is to make
another copy.
And if you plan to destroy one copy, you must make another copy
*beforehand*.

A few months ago I wanted to set up a FTP server. So, I went to the
PureFTPd web site, only to learn that the author had just lost years
of work because his hard disk crashed. Yeah, he did backup his files,
but on another hard drive, and he had erased the backup one week ago
because he needed the room for other files!
That's why my advice is to make at least one backup on DVD-Rs. You can
destroy them by accident, but there's no way you'll even get the idea
that you can delete the files to use the space for other files...

 

[Arno Wagner]

On 20 Aug 2006 05:16:04 GMT, Arno Wagner <[email protected]>:

As far as I understand, the OP volontarily destroyed the data on the
main disk. That means, she decided to get into a state where she has
only one copy of the data, and thus no backup.

Agreed. Just as I said later in my posting.

In other words, you must have at least two copies of the data at any
time.
If by accident one copy is destroyed, the first thing to do is to make
another copy.
And if you plan to destroy one copy, you must make another copy
*beforehand*.
Agreed.

A few months ago I wanted to set up a FTP server. So, I went to the
PureFTPd web site, only to learn that the author had just lost years
of work because his hard disk crashed. Yeah, he did backup his files,
but on another hard drive, and he had erased the backup one week ago
because he needed the room for other files!
Ooops.

That's why my advice is to make at least one backup on DVD-Rs. You can
destroy them by accident, but there's no way you'll even get the idea
that you can delete the files to use the space for other files...

That is why I advise three rotating backups on independent mediaa sets.
And of course that backups are non-optiona; and not available as
"reserve space" at all. Personally I don't like DVD-R, because it
is extremely difficult to estimate their reliability.

Arno

 

[Fabien LE LEZ]

Personally I don't like DVD-R, because it
is extremely difficult to estimate their reliability.

Reliability comes from redundancy.
I make one complete backup on DVD-R once a week.
If worse comes to worst (i.e. my two hard-drive-based backups are
dead, and some DVD-Rs are unreadable), to lose one month of work would
mean that four different sets of DVD-Rs (burnt recently) are dead.

Note that if only a few sectors are unreadable, not everything is
lost, since I put 3% PAR2 redundancy.

And of course, a good way to avoid the temptation of erasing a
hard-drive-based backup is to always have a spare hard drive handy. A
medium-sized (let's say, 120GB) hard drive is dead cheap now.

 

[Arno Wagner]

On 20 Aug 2006 10:26:37 GMT, Arno Wagner <[email protected]>:

Reliability comes from redundancy.

Actually redundancy increases reliability. If the base reliability
is low enough you need a lot of redundancy. If the base reliability
is unknown, it is difficult to know how much redundaancy you need.

I make one complete backup on DVD-R once a week.
If worse comes to worst (i.e. my two hard-drive-based backups are
dead, and some DVD-Rs are unreadable), to lose one month of work would
mean that four different sets of DVD-Rs (burnt recently) are dead.

Ok, with this shedule, even a low-reliability medium is fine.

Note that if only a few sectors are unreadable, not everything is
lost, since I put 3% PAR2 redundancy.

Nice idea. I will have a look at it.

I still use 3.5" MODs for baackup and long-term storage. The drive
and most disks are now 8 years old and I still have not lost a
single bit. And you can get new drives and disks todaay. But
I can fit a complete (Linux) backup on two 640MB media, which
makes thiongs easy. I aalso recently started to experiment with
online storage, but so far it is too slow.

For Windows (games mostly), I do image-backups to a RAID-1 (Linux) in
the same computer. But loosing the Windows stuff would be
inconvenient, not critical. And savegames and the installation
partition (c are also backed up to a different computer.

And of course, a good way to avoid the temptation of erasing a
hard-drive-based backup is to always have a spare hard drive handy. A
medium-sized (let's say, 120GB) hard drive is dead cheap now.

Agreed. Also very handy if a drive you are using starts to act up.
And very helpful in testing whether you can actually restore your
backup, as you should do once aa year or so.

Arno

 

[Michael L. Squires]

I bought a Maxtor USB external drive which died very quickly; on opening
up the case it turned out to have a standard IDE drive inside. I was able
to plug it into a PC using the standard power and IDE cables and then run
Maxtor's disk utility for internal drives, which told me the same thing
the utility for external drives had said - drive was dead.

I had no real interest in putting the external case back together again,
so I didn't take much care in taking it apart. The only part that might
be difficult to recreate was the aluminized tape used to seal some openings
in order to get RF leakage down.

Mike Squires
not a Maxtor fan

 

[dr]

I bought a Maxtor USB external drive which died very quickly; on opening
up the case it turned out to have a standard IDE drive inside. I was able
to plug it into a PC using the standard power and IDE cables and then run
Maxtor's disk utility for internal drives, which told me the same thing
the utility for external drives had said - drive was dead.

I had no real interest in putting the external case back together again,
so I didn't take much care in taking it apart. The only part that might
be difficult to recreate was the aluminized tape used to seal some openings
in order to get RF leakage down.

Mike Squires
not a Maxtor fan

Thanks Mike. Excellent, relevant and useful information. Good to know
it may contain a standard IDE. I think I will follow your example.

As for any other info, refer to the last line of my original post.
RELEVANT info on troubleshooting my problem was the request.

Going off on tangents, and self-flagellating over my choice of backup
strategy was not on topic. I asked for suggestions, not criticism and
back patting over your supposed superior backup skills.

If anyone HAD asked, I have THREE copies of all data contained on the
MAXTOR, one set on CD-R, one one set DVD-R and another on a large flash
drive. I have no data loss, but thank you very much for your "obvious
concern".

At issue was $100 bucks lost on a two week old external drive, and the
convenience of having the files available immediately -as opposed to
restoring from several disks, and loading multiple DVD files.

I thought this was a tech help site, not the Algonquin Round Table.
Have a nice day.

 

[Arno Wagner]

Thanks Mike. Excellent, relevant and useful information. Good to know
it may contain a standard IDE. I think I will follow your example.

As for any other info, refer to the last line of my original post.
RELEVANT info on troubleshooting my problem was the request.

Going off on tangents, and self-flagellating over my choice of backup
strategy was not on topic. I asked for suggestions, not criticism and
back patting over your supposed superior backup skills.

If anyone HAD asked, I have THREE copies of all data contained on the
MAXTOR, one set on CD-R, one one set DVD-R and another on a large flash
drive. I have no data loss, but thank you very much for your "obvious
concern".

At issue was $100 bucks lost on a two week old external drive, and the
convenience of having the files available immediately -as opposed to
restoring from several disks, and loading multiple DVD files.

You could have told us that earlier. Many people that ask questions
like yours here do not have any additional copies of the data
and are far to willing to experiment and do additional damage.

I thought this was a tech help site, not the Algonquin Round Table.
Have a nice day.

You know, this is not a site at all. This is usenet. One of the fitrs
working P2P technologies. And the "round Table" is a pretty good
description. Anybody may say anything here, no moderation is employed
and social control does not work. The way to go is a "killfile"
(ancient usenet technology that allows you to ignore specific people
automatically).

Arno