Which donor drive should I look for to do a PCB Hot Swap?

History:
My DiamondMax Plus 8 drive is no longer accessible due to some electrical work being done in my house. Electricians cut main line to my office and reconnected power on and off multiple times not knowing that my computers were on that line. One computer is fine but unfortunately the business computer with Quickbooks is the one that failed. Last good backup I have is from 01/2007.

The drive booted into Win98 once and then went to scandisk due to bad sectors being found. Rebooted not knowing that was the last time I was going to see the OS loading. Drive is now detectable in BIOS as N40P.

HDDScan: Maxtor N40P, Firmware 159Z

Resolution:
PCB Hot swap?
Or send out to Data Recovery company (AF?)

Specs:
Diamondmax Plus 8
20GB
ATA/133 HDD

Date: 01SEP2002
Code: NAR61590
LBA: 40718160

6E020L0510201
AAA

S/N: E108NYRE

K,G,G,A

A243

Made in Singapore (2)

PCB:
92315029

B2FEP1

24082LEJHM
ER

Hi,

Hotswap will not help you. Some essential modules from the harddisk are damaged and can only be restored by expensive tools.
A DR company will be your only solution.

Best regards,

Dobre

A PCB Hot Swap wont work for you in this case.

If your drive is showing up as an N40P, it has a Service Area corruption, most likely the G-List.

You can swap PCB's all you like, but unfortunately it won't fix your issue.

I'm sure someone here can help you, where are you located?

Your G-List is overflowed. your PCB is ok. you must need professinal help.
SCANDISK/CHKDSK loss more data if bad sectors. those tools r not bad sector fixing tool, those r file system fixing too.

I'm located in Southern California. Well I'm glad I didn't go through all the trouble to do a Hot swap when it sounds like the service area (G-List).

Anyone have any experience with lowcostrecovery.com ?

Hi tomas21,

You could test them :

Ask to speak to techo at lowcostrecovery and ask this question :

Has this techo heard of "00290139" ?

If not stay away from this techo.

btw. more than 50% professional world's best DR experts (on the web that is)
can't answer this question correctly.

Also - more than 60% of so called DR professionals (on the web) can't fix your problem.
Sometimes some "pros" gonna fux up your drive so good to make sure no one can get
your data and embarass them. Some "pros" also do this for free.

Be cautious, cause quite often you only get one chance with some professionals
and that's often a "no chance" at no cost to you.

coffeebean wrote:Ask to speak to techo at lowcostrecovery and ask this question :

Has this techo heard of "00290139" ?

If not stay away from this techo.

What is this suppose to mean?

It seems like mr. coffeebean has a lot of doubts about most of DR companies (based on his posts thru this forum). I would not do that, because there is a lot of knowladgeble people in this forum, who own their small DR firms and trying to be as carefull and reasonable as possible.

I have heard of lowcostrecovery and in very positive way. Their technicians are very professional.

Last edited by harddrivespecialist on June 26th, 2008, 17:41, edited 1 time in total.

post53229.html?hilit=00290139#p53229

Hi,

I think CoffeeBean is right, with that question u can make a decision

BTW years ago when i didn't have any FW diagnostics/repair tool I experimented with HotSwap (invented for myself) to access the data area of such drives, but I had to do pretty much programming to deal with the shifts in the data area...
So it is possible, but is it worth?
U would need some weeks/months of research to solve this problem on your own, an average recovery lab can probably solve it in much shorter interval.

pepe

Hi harddrivespecialist,

If "professional" don't know about 00290139 then he / she is no specialist
and should switch to some other career - truly and sorry to say so.

This is so elementary and offers assistance to tomas21 to establish whether
this company are potentially "professionals". I would also ask them if they know
what "RDMT" means.

Modules also have names or short numbering and if someone prefers to remember a whole number, it is his choice. I don't believe this is a best question you can ask a technician.

post41673.html?hilit=rdmt#p41673

Old PC3000 (dos version) has this P-List module as 0029XXX
PC3000 PCI has it as number 18

Most of us will remeber this module as P-List.

Just to close the loop we ended up using Lowcostrecovery. Wow what an tremendous help Robert was at this company. Not only did he recover all of our data but was extremely responsive and willing to go the extra mile ensuring our data's integrity. He would send updated screen shots of various files so that we could validate them.

I highly highly recommend them for recovery service!

Previous post was June, 27 and today is August, 5. You have paid good cash for their services, so they have done their duty (as musch as or as low as... xxx $, no matter the amount) . They have recovered your data but did they tell you exactly what they have fixed at low level on the drive ? Probably not. Anyway your target was recovering the data. Just for statistical purpose and if you wish, can you tell how much did you pay for the service ? If don't want in public just drop a PM.
Regards.

They were actually very detailed about what had happened and the steps they took to recover.

Issue: 2 Drives on Raid both failed after massive power surges. Maxtor & Seagate

Response:
There was damage to the Maxtor that lead to the firmware problem but I believe it started before the main problem that brought you to us. With that in mind the Seagate may give us an undamaged look at files but we would need to locate parts to recover it.

Over the weekend I am going to try to reverse the sectors it marked as bad and try to extract those two QBW files. It may give me the sectors needed to extract a better copy of the QBW files. I received the parts for the Seagate drive today but it looks like the drive has more problems than the Maxtor. The circuit board is non functional and two of the four heads have detached. This is very strange because either the heads or the pcb go out independently and not at the same time. I will email you on Monday with the final results of the Maxtor drive.

The second pass at the drive with a repaired translator module provided more data than the first pass. Before the drive failed it must have been marking good sectors as bad and then failed. This caused the translator not to use those marked sectors. The second pass allowed me to recover 100% of all your data. This is very strange because these drives typically do not fail this way.

Price: $314

Very honest fee. Maybe I'll had the maxtor translator repaired first, so no need for a second pass, but anyway the result is a case solved, at a honest fee.
You were unlucky with the Seagate head and PCB... very strange indeed.

Which donor drive should I look for to do a PCB Hot Swap?

Which donor drive should I look for to do a PCB Hot Swap?

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