www.deadharddrive.com

[thegh0st0fme]

Five years ago, I moved out of my first apartment and gave my parents an aging desktop that I hadn't used in quite a while. The only part I took out of it was an internal HDD that I used for back up purposes. Somewhere during the move, however, the drive got damaged and became inaccessible. It turned out, too, that all the information on it that I stored as back ups became the only copies I had, as my normal hard drive became lost at some point.

For five years, I tried to get it working again. Well, "tried" is a bit much. Mostly, I'd just plug it back in to my computer about once a year and hope for the best, but that never worked. But I held on to the drive nonetheless, hoping that one day I'd be able to find a (cheap) solution to get it fixed. As my knowledge of computers grew over the years, I kept looking out for any information that might help with the hard drive, but nothing really stood out. The only option I had found was sending it in to a professional data recovery service for thousands of dollars; I was desperate to get the information from it, but not that desperate.

Then, about a year ago, I stumbled onto DeadHardDrive.com and felt that glimmer of hope. I had read all sorts of quick-fix guides over the years, but none of them worked. But when I read the story on the main page, I realized how similar the circumstances were: my hard drive just wouldn't power up at all; no clicking, no whirring, no obvious signs of life. So when I saw that a PCB replacement might make a difference, I figured I'd give it a shot.

Unfortunately, at the time, I was dead broke, so I had to put the idea on the back burner. Then, about two weeks ago, the thought suddenly popped into my head again and I started searching for a replacement PCB. Sure enough, I found an exact match for only $25 and ordered it immediately.

I was actually surprised by how easy it was to replace the board. Here I was thinking it was going to be an arduous, slow task, but all it entailed was taking out four Torx screws, swapping the boards, and replacing the screws.

The moment of truth came. I installed the drive, powered up the computer, and entered the BIOS. To my immense shock, the BIOS actually recognized...something. It was displaying a hard drive, but it had the incorrect firmware version. While this wasn't a success, I felt encouraged considering I never got this far in the past.

I took the hard drive back out and double-checked the connections. I noticed that the PCB wasn't seated all the way on one connection and I pressed down hard enough to ensure that it was. I put the hard drive back in, went back in to the BIOS, and there it was: the hard drive was once again recognized (correctly) by the BIOS.

I loaded up Windows, looked under My Computer, and felt my heart leap. Not one single byte of data was corrupted. It was as if I had opened a time capsule of perfectly-preserved information. I was able to move all the data off of the old hard drive on to my new one and once again, all is well in the world.

I just wanted to say thanks to you, Neville, for the information you provided. I never would have thought to give this option a try were it not for finding your story through Google. So thank you!

[nev]

Awesome story! Thanks for sharing!

[dataSpheric]

Hey way to go. One part I left out of my more recent post is the first time I put my rebuilt drive into an external case and plugged it in via USB, I got that beep-click, beep-click, beep-click, that indicates a drive head just kinda banging around uselessly.....and I was totally prepared to bum out but that little geek light in the back of my head said "try another USB cable", you know that geek-freak moment where you want to panic but your mind says "try the obvious". And it worked.

I figured my story had enough drama in it without this little detail but there you go.

And like you, I backshelved this recovery because like you, I was reasonably backed up to begin with. My real story was when this drive crashed it happened in the context of my whole working machine failing so my getting through the chaos was more about ressurecting old Windows machines and reassembling backups and porting them from Linux while I got another serious Linux deck up and running and that was way more grief than the actual HD ressurection.

EVEN US PROS OCCASIONALLY GET BITTEN FOR NOT HAVING BACKED UP.
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Beating a dead horse is a statement intended to convey futility. Whoever said it obviously never tried because it can be really relaxing.

[corbingravely]

Guys, I don’t know where to ask my question. So I am posting it here. I have a SSD (solid state hard drive). It is almost fried. I just cannot get it fixed. The memory looks as if it is just 8 Mb total.








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