Hard Drive Revival – Part 1

I thought I would document my experience with reviving a seemingly dead hard drive that I have taken receipt from a friend and small business owner.

Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive (Top)

Seagate Barracuda Hard Drive (Bottom)

To set some background, as is often the case, this hard drive contains precious data which has largely not been backed up elsewhere. Furthermore, any attempts to boot up a computer with this drive connected fail (the computer won’t even power on). This has occurred with three separate computers.

At this point you might think you are screwed but we have a possible solution.

Sure, you could use one of those data recovery companies that want a couple of hundred dollars out of your pocket before they will even have a look at your drive let alone put on one of them bunny suits in a clean room. Save your hard earned cash as we have a cheaper option that might just do the trick.

Basically, PATA and SATA IDE hard drives have a circuit board on them that controls the operation of  the drive. I have a hunch that this hard drive has a fried board and I am banking on the possibility that swapping the board out with a new one will fix the issue. It’s a gamble but it’s still cheaper than getting the data recovery mob to work their magic.

At this stage, I have just purchased a new board from eBay that matches the existing one (which is incredibly important). I can hopefully expect it turn up in about a week but in the meantime I will also need to pick up a special screwdriver to match the screws fastening the board to the drive (a trip to Bunnings should satisfy that requirement).

I will post an update when I have everything I need to move to the next stage, hopefully with some success. At the end of the day, this highlights the need for:

• backing up your data,
• an off site copy of your backup (a third copy in addition to the original and initial backup),
• effective power management (such as a UPS that I wrote about in yesterday’s blog post).

Stay tuned!