ahh my brother is an idiot

[summit]

he was taking apart the computer to install a hard drive that i bought for him. he's into making films and such for high school, i thought he was competent enough for that. the problem is he was moving the old hd up a bay to install the new one and so the story goes ...our computer doesn't recognize the old hd.

i get home today i realize that he completely snapped the SATA data connector (the plastic piece, the metal connectors are still there).

i will post pics later if you guys would like them to help me, but please tell me there's a solution for this, i have some docs on there that i did not back up yet.

cliffs:
brother tried installing hd
broke old one because he snapped the plastic off the sata data port
the sata cable is uber loose.


thanks.

 

[ShawnD1]

Looks like a tough shit situation. If you're confident in your soldering skills, you could try soldering the contacts back on. It might work long enough to move all the files off the drive. Just make damn sure you don't solder a short circuit; it could destroy the motherboard and PSU.

 

[taltamir]

data recovery company.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Summit
broke old one because he snapped the plastic off the sata data port

I broke the plastic housing for my sata power connector off of my drive once, it left the metal contact fingers hanging out just like you are saying for the data connector.

What I did was get some superglue from walmart (was $2 for pack of 4 IIRC) and I used a toothpick to carefully put superglue on the just the surface that broke and I held the plastic piece with my fingers, squeezing it onto the drive for a little bit (couple minutes). Then I left it to finish drying overnight.

Then I carefully plugged the cable back into the drive making sure I stressed it as little as possible. Powered up and got my data off there right quick. But the drive still works to this day.

 

[HendrixFan]

I had the same thing happen to one of my drives. The plastic piece is stuck in the SATA cable, so I just slide the metal prongs into the plastic that is stuck in the cable. The drive has worked fine for over a year like that.

 

[F1shF4t]

Snapped the plastic piece of one of my seagate 320gig drive also. Just super glued the plastic bit back with a sata cable directly to the drive.
I guess I will run into trouble if the sata cable ever goes bad, on the positive side its holds well and you can actualy pick up the drive by the sata cable

 

[13Gigatons]

death to plastic.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: Summit
broke old one because he snapped the plastic off the sata data port

I broke the plastic housing for my sata power connector off of my drive once, it left the metal contact fingers hanging out just like you are saying for the data connector.

What I did was get some superglue from walmart (was $2 for pack of 4 IIRC) and I used a toothpick to carefully put superglue on the just the surface that broke and I held the plastic piece with my fingers, squeezing it onto the drive for a little bit (couple minutes). Then I left it to finish drying overnight.

Then I carefully plugged the cable back into the drive making sure I stressed it as little as possible. Powered up and got my data off there right quick. But the drive still works to this day.

This ^

The piece didn't end up staying on, but instead stuck inside the cable. Still works just fine...still that was three years ago.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

If you can find an identical drive, you can swap PCB/connectors.
Did this on an old IDE drive that one of the other techs managed to mangle the pins on it to a point where I couldn't get them all straightened out.

 

[AstroGuardian]

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski
If you can find an identical drive, you can swap PCB/connectors.
Did this on an old IDE drive that one of the other techs managed to mangle the pins on it to a point where I couldn't get them all straightened out.

Depending on the drive this can be a huge mistake. Some drives are known to keep the MBR on the PCB in a flash memory. So if you switch PCB with identical drive, you can destroy the partitions and also data. Have to be extremely careful with that option and use it al last resort.

 

[CoinOperatedBoy]

Get a smarter brother.