www.deadharddrive.com

Ice · Officially active! Joined: 29 Mar 2006 Posts: 2

Well, a potentially interesting story started for me today...

I was sitting on my PC coding, downloading some torrents and listenning to music when suddenly the machine froze and the music started looping. I heard the drive stopping but I though that it probably was just a glitch so I restarted the PC. Oh no! The bios took much longer than usual in the Detecting IDE drives part... I opened the case and tried to figure out which of my 2 drives wasnt working... It was my system disk that had failed.... I unplugged it, let it cool off a bit and plugged it again.... NOTHING! It didnt start spinning... Sad

I got really panicked cause I have this huge project I was working on on that drive.... After the initial shock, I sat down and tried to think the whole thing over calmly. So I thought that the platters inside are probably in good condition since the drive didnt fall down or anything... Its probably some circuit on the board the drive has that got fried... I though that if I switched it with one from another drive it may work... But I had my doubts so I started googling for "rebuild fried hard drive","rebuild hard disk" etc.
The first relevant result I went through was about this guy who managed to take the platters out of a dead laptop disk and put them in a working one. He succeeded in recovering the data... But that seemed a little to much! Plus he diddnt really give any info on how he did it except that he practiced a lot on already dead disks.... So I started searching again and I found this place.... To say the least, after reading other people's posts in this forum I felt I wasnt alone anymore and that there was still hope....

So what I will do next is go get the weird star shaped screw driver for the screws of my HD. And then start searching for some compatible drive.....
I only fear that I wont be able to find a compatible drive since the sticker on my drive says 15.12.2004 which is like 1 1/2 years ago!

I will keep posting my progress here and hopefully this thread will become another happy ending dead hard drive story...!

In the meantime does anyone of you have any pointers to give me on what I should pay attention to in order to see if another drive would be compatible with mine?

Ice · Officially active! Joined: 29 Mar 2006 Posts: 2

Ok, I found out how to check if two logic boards are compatible...

On top of the drive where the drive info is written, there is a field named
MDL (prolly means model). My model is WD800JB-00FMA0. The FMA part is what makes the difference. Another thing I noticed is that my drive is "Special". I have checked a lot of 80GB hard disks the last couple of days and mine is the only one that is named WD Caviar SE. The key word being SE. I have already made an attempt with a newer drive than mine but it diddnt work. The bios was able to find the drive but the drive made some noise so I decided to abort. My drive looks different from the other 80gb drives I have checked, it is completely black while the other drives are silver on top.
Thats all folks...

Now I am off to check some drives I have in storage in my garage, and then I will go to the office to check my server's drive which I now know is an 80GB ETA drive. I am hoping that the model value is incremented alphabeticly so ETA is just prior to FMA. I will visually inspect though in order to see if there is some chance it will work....