Hi there,

I work at a small mom-and-pop computer store. Yes, I'm one of those dangerous amateurs you're always talking about. Yesterday my boss plugged in an IDE laptop drive into one of our bench systems for a routine data transfer. It immediately caught on fire. No one can figure out what he did wrong, but I'm guessing he plugged the connector in upside down or one pin off, sending 5v over one of the data lines.

Luckily we found a very similar drive in our dead pile... The burned drive was a Seagate Momentus 4200.2 (ST9100822A), and the donor drive was a Seagate Momentus 5400.2 (ST9100823A)... One model off, but they have identical PCB's, even the same firmware revision. I figured what the hell, and I swapped the PCB's. Originally it wouldn't spin up or be detected by the BIOS, so I inspected the PCB, found a chip that looked like a SPI EEPROM (SST 25P05AVG), desoldered it off the dead drive, and transplanted it onto the working one. Now the drive is correctly recognized by the BIOS, looking good, can see the correct partition information in windows, and all the data looks to be there. At this point I was feeling pretty good about myself, but my celebrations were premature... Any time I tried to clone the data with norton ghost, it would hang at "checking NTFS partition", and any time I tried to clone with acronis trueimage it would get half way through then say "failed to read from sector 1". I tried a byte-for-byte copy with linux's dd command, but it would get 10gb in then stop for no reason.

Now, I've managed to get almost all the important data off, but the drive is still incredibly flaky. About one in 10 times it's not detected by the BIOS on startup, and if you run it for a few hours eventually it'll spin down and become inaccessible.. I'm not really looking for any advice, I know I'll be told to send it to a professional, but more than anything I'm just sort of curious why it would behave like this... I figured the platters should have been unaffected, so either the pcb swap works 100% or it doesn't work at all. The customer isn't concerned about reusing the drive, he was going to retire this laptop anyway, and as long as we haven't lost his outlook pst file he's happy, but in the future I wish I knew what could cause this sort of flaky behavior.

Thanks for any replies!

Zapping the pcb can and frequently does damage the heads/preamp. Perhaps yours got hit just enough to become not entirely stable.

The other issues you're describing sound like pretty normal response to bad sectors on the disk.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Yeah this drive needs to be put on a data recovery imager that is designed to deal with these weak and failing drives. Such as Atola/Deepspar.

Hi, If you only need the Outlook.pst file then I suggest you try a recovery tool called Dmde. The free version will allow you to save single files to an alternative drive.
So boot to windows from a first drive with the customer drive as a secondary.
Run dmde and open the secondary volume. Browse the file system and recover the outlook.pst file you require. Otherwise hardware imaging might be the only way.

What is up with all of these people advertising DMDE lately...

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

If it was any good it wouldnt be so bad...

Well I suppose Dataextractor from Ace might be an alternative.
Not meaning to advertise Acelab products though.

The data has already been recovered. It was recovered three days ago before I even made this post. Please do not solicit me with offers for your products or services. I am not interested. I just wanted to discuss theories, to further my understanding.

PS: Anyone who sends me spam PM's gets their name added to my list of companies never to do business with, which is publicly listed on my company's website, and posted physically in our lobby. I do not tolerate spam. Please do not send me offers for your services.

Oh, and back to the topic on hand, is there any way of non-invasively testing the heads or the preamps? Any continuity check or resistance test I can do to the contacts on the bottom of the drive without breaking the seal on the drive?

Some drives yes, some drives no. Whats your website? I want to see your list

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Seems to me that people thought you needed your data and tried offering help in way of a professional service.

This is not spam and not the attitude you should take. And as for not doing business with them, im sure everyone will survive

you are added to my list of users whose post i will never answer

pepe

PS: nor read

_________________
Adatmentés - Data recovery

See:



Sorry, it just seems this forum is teeming with dozens of desperate companies trying to sell their services to anyone and everyone who may or may not need them. Every post here seems to get "offers" for professional assistance. I specifically mentioned I don't want or need professional data recovery, yet I get unsolicited PM's anyway. I didn't mean to offend anyone, this just seems like a really spammy forum and it bothers me.

Thanks for the assistance guys, I'm out of here.

Touchiest Canadian ever, heh.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I agree i dont like eating spam either. Its disgusting. Anyway.. the whole 7 people in canada who might visit your webpage wont cause a second recession in europe.
Soz- no offence to my friends to Canada. but who the hell is this bloke.

moan moan moan moan- its a public forum and people can advertise, post pm's as they wish.
You know what real spam is.. 1000+ emails daily to an email account.

Thanks for leaving. dont forget to close the door.

pff- you try and help someone...

_________________
It seems that the unluckiest people in the world are those that don't backup.
Free Solutions
Picasaweb- Pictures and movies | Dropbox - Documents and other..

I agree.

This forum is not a helpdesk. It is a marketplace and referral service.

Where have you been Frank, we've all missed you!!

This forum is not a helpdesk. It is a place where people who actually do recovery get together and talk about their problems and how to fix them. When someone who does not do recovery comes on and asks for someone to tell them how to do their own recovery for free, they typically get referred to someone who is capable of performing the recovery.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I had intended to stay away, but my therapist said I should confront my demons.

And you give money to the therapist ?