www.deadharddrive.com

alaskawildrose · Officially active! Joined: 28 Jan 2007 Posts: 3

Our external hard drive had a "crash", and it appears that the PCB is not working anymore. We have years worth of valuable pictures on it, and really can't afford the expensive route of data recovery, so we're on the search for a PCB for that model- or the whole drive. If anyone has one to sell, please let me know.

rwei19

Did you get your drive recovered?

rwei19

Please let me know if you have a working board for this drive.

alaskawildrose · Officially active! Joined: 28 Jan 2007 Posts: 3

Unfortunately we have not been able to recover the drive yet. Still working on it. Smile

tiredoldbruce · Active contributor Joined: 12 Jan 2008 Posts: 5

I have the same type of hard drive- manufactured in Mar 2002 but with part # 079219 that I successfully recovered. I don't see a firmware # on it , which is important to have matched up when you find a replacement. I paid $40 for a used drive (Apr 2002 w/ same part #) on ebay. I swapped out the circuit boards and used Getbackdata from Runtime Software to succesfully recover a good chunk of files from my almost-dead drive. Yay for me.
Unfortunately, I was not able to recover 7 yrs. worth of pictures. So my new problem is: should I get different software and try to recover more files or should I just count my blessings that I was able to retrieve anything?
Man, I will always back up my files now. Pictures are heartbreaking to lose. It's like the Kinks said in an old song: "People take pictures of each other just in case someone thought they had missed it. And to prove that they really existed." That is a totally irrelevant quote, but I love that song.

tiredoldbruce · Active contributor Joined: 12 Jan 2008 Posts: 5

I would be willing to sell the drive because I wanted to use it in a modified Xbox. I'd be willing to trade for a 120GB or bigger drive or sell it for what I paid- $40 + shipping.

tiredoldbruce · Active contributor Joined: 12 Jan 2008 Posts: 5

Just thought I'd mention that the circuit boards on these two drives looked slightly different- the bigger chips on them had different part #'s and there were a couple of really small semiconductor devices on one of them that the other was lacking. I mention this because even though it is best to have the drives as identical as possible, it is not always necessary. Maybe it's a gamble, but it worked for me.
I even read on another forum a post from a hard drive recovery specialist that said even if the boards are totally identical the chances for recovery are very slim as the platters are calibrated at the factory and this affects the circuit board blah-blah-blah. Whatevah, man.