Recovering Data From a Damaged Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Larry
  • Start date Start date
L

Larry

I thoughtlessly smoked my wife's friend's HD by reversing the power
plug to the drive. (Don't ask how!) Although I have reached geezerhood
status, I still
do stupid things.
A friend suggested I might salvage the
drive by getting a duplicate drive and swapping the drive boards -
maybe the HD drive itself was OK but the board was dead. Neat idea.

I got a drive on eBay and swapped boards. I slaved the drive in a
Windows system.
My Computer saw the drive, but said it could not write to it. When I
tried
opening the drive icon, it showed the main folders of the drive
(Windows, My
Documents, etc), but those folders would not open further and Windows
wanted to
format the drive.

A DOS bootdisk gave about the same results. A Knoppix CD
saw the drive, but not the folder titles. The free, disabled Easy
Recovery Professional software from OnTrack website could not access
the drive with either its
boot diskette or from the "advanced features" of the program operating
in a Windows mode, with the sick drive as slave.


Any ideas for data recovery? I am going to be very careful with this
drive, as I don't want to screw it up any further.

LarryC
 
I thoughtlessly smoked my wife's friend's
HD by reversing the power plug to the drive.
Click to expand...

I've reported you to the RSPCPPHDBFATBB
(Don't ask how!)
Click to expand...

We know how.
Although I have reached geezerhood status, I still do stupid things.
Click to expand...

Thats when you do even more stupid things.
A friend suggested I might salvage the drive by getting a
duplicate drive and swapping the drive boards - maybe the
HD drive itself was OK but the board was dead. Neat idea.
Click to expand...

When it works.
I got a drive on eBay and swapped boards.
I slaved the drive in a Windows system.
Click to expand...

What did you do about the drive type entry ?
It should have been set to AUTO if it was
set to that in the system you fried it in.
My Computer saw the drive, but said it could not write to it.
Click to expand...

Why do you want to write to it at all if you want to get
the data off it ? Thats the last thing you should be doing.
When I tried opening the drive icon, it showed the main folders
of the drive (Windows, My Documents, etc), but those folders
would not open further and Windows wanted to format the drive.
Click to expand...
A DOS bootdisk gave about the same results. A Knoppix
CD saw the drive, but not the folder titles. The free, disabled
Easy Recovery Professional software from OnTrack website
could not access the drive with either its boot diskette or
from the "advanced features" of the program operating
in a Windows mode, with the sick drive as slave.
Click to expand...
Any ideas for data recovery?
Click to expand...

Check that drive type setting question.
I am going to be very careful with this drive,
as I don't want to screw it up any further.
Click to expand...

You might have done that already if you
wrote to it with the wrong drive type used.

It may still be possible to get the essential data
back by scanning for the headers of particular
types of data files. Thats better than nothing.

Best to lock all knives etc away too in case you get Bobbitted.
 
(e-mail address removed) (Larry) wrote in @posting.google.com:
Any ideas for data recovery? I am going to be very careful with this
drive, as I don't want to screw it up any further.
Click to expand...

If the data is really important, call up Ontrack and get a price quote from
them to recover the data. If it's acceptable, then ship them the drive.
I've been quite happy with their service in the past in recovering data
from a Novell netware volume on a dead Seagate Barracuda drive.
 
The techniques that worked for data recovery in the past are changing
all the time. Swapping PCB circuit boards has always been a
straightforward matter - but because of current drive design it often
won't work anymore.

Here is a link to a "Technical White Paper" that we released last week
at the "2004 NASA/IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and
Technologies (MSST04)".

http://actionfront.com/ts_whitepaper.asp

(Note - It is a technical paper / not marketing hype.)

In particular there is a section on PCB swaps to recover hard drives.
See section "4.1.1 - Replace the PCB"

The paper is quite detailed and technical so it's beyond most - but
well worth the read for those who can follow or are interested.
 
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