www.deadharddrive.com

[happyhappy]

Its a shame this site isn't more active, because I know it can fill a desperate need for a lot of folks. It helped me get started, and put me in a position to do some self help. I did so cautiously as I was prepared to spend the big bux to a lab if absolutely necessary; I tried to avoid anything that would make matters worse.

I fried a Maxtor 6Y120PO by doing a hot plug in (a long story of frustration precedes why I did such an unwise thing). The drive motor didn't start so iyt seemed a potential candidate for a board swap. It so happened that I had a similar 160 gb Maxtor which had the same bios version (YAR41BWO) that my fried drive had. The is shown as "Code" on the drive label. Maxtors seem to have different versions of versions, however, with another 5 character number shown on a babel on the circuit board side of the card, in my case E6FYB. I tried to find a perfect match asking eBay sellers what ttheir drive showed but E6FYB was real tough to find. So out of frustration I tried a pc board swap with the board from my 160gb drive.

It started off in an encouraging manner. The drive motor started up and the bios recognized the drive. Alas, all indications I got from Windows/DOS were that the drive was indeed nuked and it was reported as being unformatted.

With great trepidation, I tried the trial version of a program called GetDataBack from getdataback.com. Supposedly the free trial does everything the purchased version does, but will not permit actually recovering anything. That way you only pay once you know the software actually finds something. I installed it then ran it. It found nothing--BIG disappointment.

It so happened that a couple days later MaximumPC magazine had a review of this program. They reported similar results with the trial version, but said when they tried the paid for version it found everything. This piqued my curiosity, so I went back to their website.

I stumbled across something in a section called "How to do a data recovery" that made me think it was worth another try. It said to install the software in a functional PC without the dead drive attached. I had installed with the dead but bios recognzed drive attached, so I uninstalled and then reinstalled without the drive attached.

I cannot express how happy I was when I rebooted and the free trial of GetDataBack started reporting file structures. I suspect I did lose some stuff, but after I paid for the $80 license key I ended up getting back all the critical files I wanted, a huge quantity of scanned pdf files and digital photos.

I was mightily impressed with GetDataBack. One cool thing was when I called them up with a simple question and a real human answered "hello" and he actually knew all about the software. It may be a one man shop for all I know.

But I can report that the card swap can recover at least some Maxtors. I think it is worthy to note that even though swapping cards may get a dead drive running, it may not make files accessible. But that does not that all hope is lost.

I hope this helps someone......I know the feeling.

By the way, once I got a clean XP install set up and restored my files to it., I ran a Ghost to DVDs., then bought a Maxtor One Touch II external drive with Dantz Retrospect and set it up for nightly backups. I never want to go through this experience again.