Hello everyone,

I am new here, and after months of research and not finding anything that works, I said better to ask here, as it seems that there are some guys that know they way around this drives.

I have this OCZ Vertex 4 256G drive and no computer with any type of interface or connection (that I came across to) would not recognise it.
This is the story of it's "death": Back in 2016 I had it in a USB portable rack as a extended memory connected to a Volksvagen RNS510 media in the car for quite a month working very fine. After a while, the songs that I had on it, were not recognised anymore, and I had to plug it out and in again in the USB interface to recognise it, until one day the drive wasn't "seen" anymore. Tried to connect it with the same rack to a USB port on my computer and surprize, I get the message that: The USB device connected is not recognised by windows. I left it in a drawer waiting years to appear on the internet methods to recover and no luck yet. At this day it behaves the same way and still I don't want to throw it away because I still have hope.

As you can see in one photo , the green LED from the mainboard is lit, so I guess that it gets its power but may it be that the INDILINX controller is dead?

I also shortend the first two pins from J2FW switch and it gets recognised as an 128G drive bot not inisialized (and when I try to initialize it with MBR/GPT type I get the error: The media is write protected). I tried to recover with Disk Drill that 128g portion of the drive and it founds nothing:

I have some important personal data on it that I really want to recover and I don't know if there is any way to do so without paying the big money to the recovery companies, because simply I don't have that much money to waste!

Can anybody give me an idea on how to deal with this drive?

Thank you!

Here are the photos:

Hello,
i don't think you have much chances against this thing without tools and knowledge. But there's a good chance to get it recovered in a lab.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Hello.
Connect terminal to J4. Maybe it will say something important about drive's condition.

Thank you for the response, but how do I do that, if it's not much to ask. I have some electronics knowledge but no programming. The closest thing that goes through my mind when I see 4 pins with +, Tx, Rx, GND comes to RS232 connection like it was on 2000's Nokia phones. But still, no idea about the kind of software or protocol used to comunicate with tis drives.

An usb-serial port with the appropriate IO voltage, and yes, connect it to tx, rx and gnd, then open that COM port in a terminal sw.
There you need to select the transfer rate, which is most probably 115200 baud, but it can be anything else as well.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Old phone cables can work for that purpose. If you have one laying around, open it and check the chip inside. Many of those can be used as USB-to-Serial adapters. Alternatively, you can get CH341A for cheap. It can be used as both programmer and serial adapter. For terminal software, I use PUTTY.