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keylow
Deadharddrive regular
Joined: 11 Jul 2006
Posts: 22
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 Posted: Sun Aug 13, 2006 5:07 pm Post subject: Recovered data (I don't recommend it, but it worked) |
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I had two drives that I think the board fried out on them.
The first one would only stay up and running for about 20 minutes and only if power stayed consistant. When you booted, it would last for about 10 sec as windows went through it's start up. If by some miracle you could get it to stay recogonized, it would conk out if the screen saver kicked in. I could hear the motor trying to start up, but it just couldn't get there.
Eventually, I would not last past boot up, the bios wouldn't see it at start up. So this is what I did.
I shut down the pc. Hooked up the ribbon cable, but not the power. Once, windows had booted up and everything was up and running. I opened up device manager....Then I carefully plugged the power into the drive....right click on "computer" and click "scan for hardware changes". BINGO! A new drive appeared. I pulled all the data off and all was good in the world.
The second drive definately had a fried board and I found a replacement. It seemed to want to boot up, just like the last one, but the bios wouldn't recognize it. Instead of listing the drive info like it used to. WD blah, blah, blah 40GB, etc.... It just said WD ..... 6, nothing else, just WD ...... 6. Weird, eh? Well I did the same thing and it worked again.
I don't know how abusive (if at all) that this is on a computer, but it seems like it is not a great idea, but it worked. Go ahead and try it, but be prepared for the worst. I would recommend it only as a last ditch effort.
Any one else ever do this? did it work out or did all the smoke come out?
Thanks, |
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qubit
Active contributor
Joined: 24 Aug 2006
Posts: 7
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| Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 5:01 pm Post subject: Re: Recovered data (I don't recommend it, but it worked) |
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| keylow wrote: | | I shut down the pc. Hooked up the ribbon cable, but not the power. Once, windows had booted up and everything was up and running. I opened up device manager....Then I carefully plugged the power into the drive....right click on "computer" and click "scan for hardware changes". BINGO! A new drive appeared. I pulled all the data off and all was good in the world. |
| keylow wrote: | | Any one else ever do this? did it work out or did all the smoke come out? |
I tried that myself.
My 80GB drive, which at the time was my boot drive, developed some bad sectors (in what later turned out to be the NTFS $Logfile), and Windows XP refused to boot if the drive was even plugged in. I tried booting Windows from a fresh install on a different drive, but that made no difference. The boot process hung where it enumarated and tested the drives and partitions; I waited a long time, but it didn't get past that point.
So I tried doing exactly what you said. The moment the power cable even barely touched a contact, my system spontaneously powered down... and when I powered it back up, the 80GB drive was not any worse for wear. But the 160GB SLAVE to that drive on the same IDE cable was fried! It made a repeated "head parking" sound, in a loop. I was mortified.
This is the whole reason I had to do board-swapping in the first place...
I was able to recover the data from the 160GB drive with a board swap, but later a 300GB drive conked out as well — a sort of delayed frying. I still haven't been able to recover that one (very hard to find a match for the board).
So I absolutely recommend AGAINST doing this kind of hot-plugging! I'm glad it worked for you, and the fact that it can theoretically work makes me feel better about having tried it myself... but you got VERY lucky!
The right way to do this requires that you have an IDE card... for example, I have one made by Promise. (I'm assuming a motherboard with onboard IDE.)- With the computer turned off, unplug all hard drives that are connected to the IDE card; plug the necessary ones into the motherboard, but unplug the problem hard drive.
- Turn on computer; boot Windows.
- Go into Device Manager, and Disable the IDE card.
- Turn off the computer, and plug the problem hard drive into the IDE card.
- Turn on computer; boot Windows.
- Go into Device Manager, and Enable the IDE card.
- Windows may completely freeze up while detecting the drive; it did in my case, but the freeze was not permanent, unlike drive detection during bootup.
- Don't continue to use the drive! Just get your data off. (I used WinHex to clone the partition.)
More cases where people fried drives by hot plugging:
Wanted: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 board w/ YAR41VW0 firmware
Success recovering a dead Maxtor |
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keylow
Deadharddrive regular
Joined: 11 Jul 2006
Posts: 22
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| Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 1:11 am Post subject: Hot Swappin!!! |
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| Yeah, I knew I was playing with fire doing this, but something told me that if this didn't work, I would be sending it out to have it recovered anyways. The machine that I did this on was already whooped, so I figured, worse case scenario I would lose the drive that I was transferring to and maybe even get a free fireworks show! |
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