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Hard drive question?

P

psloan

Senior member
Group,

I hope you can help me out of a bind. I recently had a fire in my house that destroyed my computer. It was toasted pretty good. I had over 4000 pictures on the hard drive and the backups I burned to cd rom were melted into a pile of plastic where they sat on my other computer. I salvaged the hard drives and friend of mine tested them out with an old mother board and power supply. They spun up. So I tried them in my Dell and they would spin up, but the system would not boot with them connected to the ide cable. Is there anyway a person could do some work and get these running again? I sure would like to get those pictures off the drives. Both drives are ntfs.

My first thought was to take the platters out and put them into an identical drive. But then it was suggested that since they seem to spin fine, why not just replace the electronics from another drive and see if that works.

Is any of that possible? Would I be wasting my time if I tried? Anyone else do anything similar?

Yes I have looked into having it done by the pro's but they are very expensive. They quoted 500 or more just to get started.

Thanks for any help. I can post pictures of the drives if that will help. I might need help identifying them. I know one is a maxtor 80g and the other is a western digital 30 gig ( i think).

Regards

--pat
 
I've heard that you can take the controller board from the underside and replace it, and that this sometimes works. The only catch is, you've got to get the same model, with the EXACT same firmware, otherwise no go. However, this may not help you since the drives already spin up, but aren't recognized, ergo there may be some platter damage :-(
Silly question, but have you tryed putting the drives in another machine, and recovering the data from that one? Just wondering.
Hope this helps.
 
from what I've read, if you open the drive you will most likely damage the platters because tiny dust will get in and cause the heads to crash. That's why the professional places are so expensive - they work in clean rooms and space suits

interesting idea about replacing the controller board though

you said you tried the drive in another computer and it wouldn't boot - do you mean that you tried to use your disk as the boot disk? if so try it with the other computer's regular boot disk and yours as a slave (set the jumpers on your disk to slave) or on the other IDE channel
 
Originally posted by: BZ
from what I've read, if you open the drive you will most likely damage the platters because tiny dust will get in and cause the heads to crash. That's why the professional places are so expensive - they work in clean rooms and space suits

interesting idea about replacing the controller board though

you said you tried the drive in another computer and it wouldn't boot - do you mean that you tried to use your disk as the boot disk? if so try it with the other computer's regular boot disk and yours as a slave (set the jumpers on your disk to slave) or on the other IDE channel
Click to expand...

yeah, lettings dust in the drive is baaaaadddd. Fingerprints are several times thicker than the space between head and surface.

exchanging the controller board is iffy too.

Are you trying to boot off the bad drive, or put it in an existing system? This 2nd is the way to do it if it works.
 
I have put the drives in on the slave connecter on the ide cable. I think the jumpers were set to cable select. I will try it again later tonight
 
If it's that important to you, pony up the dough to have the data recovered by professionals.

And charge it to your insurance company!
 
Lost 2 computer and all the software on them to the fire. insuance has a 3k limit on pc's which includes software and perfs. So I am way over budget as it is. Next time will have a rider on the isuance to cover this sort of stuff.

--pat

Originally posted by: Nebor
If it's that important to you, pony up the dough to have the data recovered by professionals.

And charge it to your insurance company!
Click to expand...

 
No luck. I tried them in two different computers and both would not boot when the burned drives were added as a slave.

🙁
 
make sure the jumpers are set right. cable select only works with a cable select cable which isnt very common
 
Originally posted by: psloan
No luck. I tried them in two different computers and both would not boot when the burned drives were added as a slave.

🙁
Click to expand...

did you make sure the other drives were set to master?
 
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