Hard drve zapped by power surge

[thete]

Hya

Sorry to ask here, but was wondering if anyone knew where the best place to find out how to reapir a hard driuve that was zapped by a power supply blowing up? The druive still works, as in it spins uyp, but just 'clicks' all the time, I know there are data recovery firms, but they are all very expensive, and as a stufdent, I can;t really afford £300 to get a wedding video off a hard drive! I am quite experineced in computers, but have never yet found a way of repairing a hard drive that has been zapped, although I have heard that replacxing the contorller board may do it, but again, I;'d like at least soem instructiosn on how to do thsi! So if anyone has any advice at all at all, could you please help me!

Thank you all!

[gmatov]

Thete,
have you tried simply installing it in a functional computer and seeing if the data is accessible? I've had many that I could get data from in that way. A few I couldn't, but that's another story.

[bunyip]

Someone on this forum just recently had a similar problem and was able to recover the data by mounting the disk as a slave drive on another PC.

I personally had a disk crash 2 days ago, the system said the drive was not mountable. I connected it to another PC as a slave but it said it couldn't enumerate the directories.
I put the disk back in the original PC and booted the PC using the Windows XP bootable install CD and selected the 'Repair' option, ran 'chkdsk /r' and it managed to repair the directories enough for me to get all but about 20 files off the disk (17,000 files were recovered).

These may not work for you but they're worth a try.

[thete]

Wow, thanks, I have to admit, I just assumed that it wouldn;t work in any configuartion, let alone slave, I'll give that a quick go, and see how things go! Thank you again for your help!

[cpgoose]

Hey...I'm the one bunyip is talking about
My hard drive crashed a few days ago, and I was getting the "clicking" too. For some reason, I pushed the cables into the hard drive and into the motherboard a little more securely, and the clicking stopped and the computer was able to boot. It was still acting weird, though, as I was unable to get to my files.

Someone had suggested to me to try and make the drive a slave on another pc. So I unplugged the cdrom drive from my other pc, and booted the pc....and somehow it worked. Somehow, the slave drive was able to be read by the master. Sweeet. I'm still going to return the drve, though. The company told me to check the power supply's fan....because if it's not working right, the pc will get too hot, and mess up the heads on the hard drive. My fan is ok, but it's worth looking into that too.

Good luck...let us know what happens.

[The village idiot]

If the data is real valuable you could get another drive that is the exact same thing. Then remove the controll board from the working drive and connect it to the non working drive. As long as the motor spins on the bad drive, you should be able to recover most any drives with a similar powersupply glitch problem, with this method. It is unlikely the a blown supply would kill the data, or even the motors, mostly they just fry the silicon in the controller. Unless of course it was an IBM deskstar and the heads touched down on the platter with a loud grinding sound

[gmatov]

Idiot,
How can you ask a student who has good knowledge of 'puters, physically, or programwise, to tear the controls out of a hard drive to get another to run? I seriously doubt that you have the finesse (it's not easy to do such delicate soldering/desoldering( I don't think I could)), and if you do, the eeprom may still be differently programmed. I think the better advice was above this post. Plug it in as slave on another machine, and see if the data could be salvaged. I've often done it. I've had drives grind to a halt, let them cool, and restart, get the data off, and they locked up again, some, tight as a drum. They only had a spin up or two left, before the bearings seizes, or something else did.

[cpgoose]

hey gmatov,

Why does this work....hooking up the drive as a slave? The guy that
suggested this had said maybe the master will be strong enough to
read the slave....but I don't really understand what that means. If the
drive in question is having a problem....why doesn't it still have a problem
as a slave?

Thanks!

[gmatov]

Goose,
I will be damned if I know WHY it works, just that it has almost every time, for me. I've had 15 or 20 friends with probs give me their drives to salvage their data, or the whole machine from the ones who ain't about to go poking about the innards of em.
Set to slave, pull all the stuff they don't want to lose, fdisk, partition, format, put the data into a new folder and give it back. If they give me the machine and setup disk, I re-install for them. Don't like to install in my own machine because of wrong components, they'd have to fix it and most don't know how. And, if they have a Gateway or something, the restore disks won't let you, as the BIOS is changed to use their disks, "This software is intended for...", denied.
As to why, I guess the MBR is messed up so much that fdisk /mbr won't work (actually, I don't think it ever has, for me). I just finished one that Scandisk made 620 Filechecks on. Most of the folders on the C:\ drive were totally empty,Windows included, and one folder's properties had it counting into the Terabytes before I clicked it closed. I've seen that before, too.
And, you'll have wierd alpha numeric combinations of characters as file names, which you can't delete, as the name is not in the File allocation Tables, or where ever they belong. If you can open the folder at all, all the files are screwed up, as well. Format and re-install.
Another bad thing is to use the disk makers set up disk. It writes parameters to the BIOS that another machine can't read. It fools the older BIOS into thinking there are X cylinders, sectors, heads, LZs, etc., that an unmodified BIOS can't make heads or tails of. I've lost a ton of data on a 45 gig Maxtor, using Max Blast setup on a 32 gig max MOBO. No argument from them, send it back, we'll send you a new one.
I just partitioned a 40 gig for a guy's 200 pentium machine, old MOBO, did it in my machine, put it in his, all 3 partitions are visible, useable.
I don't know how anyone gets by with ONE machine. I'd be lost.
Anyhow, glad you got your data back. I think I posted to your problem a week or so ago, with the same advice.

[gmatov]

Goose,
Re-reading your note above, the "I'm the guy..." one, it wasn't actually "being read by" the master. Windows was functional on the new machine, and could read your "bad" drive's data.
And, new drives have S.M.A.R.T. on them, which WILL tell you if a drive is going bad ( I've had it do so ) and to back up and replace. The downside is, you will take a minute performance hit, if you set it to "Enable" in the BIOS, and if you don't, it won't report. You have it, why not use it? Might save some greif. I'm going to have to benchmark with it on and off to see just what the "hit" is. Mebbe I'll post. I know we all want that last little bit of speed, but.....

[The village idiot]

Idiot,
How can you ask a student who has good knowledge of 'puters, physically, or programwise, to tear the controls out of a hard drive to get another to run? I seriously doubt that you have the finesse (it's not easy to do such delicate soldering/desoldering( I don't think I could)), and if you do, the eeprom may still be differently programmed. I think the better advice was above this post. Plug it in as slave on another machine, and see if the data could be salvaged. I've often done it. I've had drives grind to a halt, let them cool, and restart, get the data off, and they locked up again, some, tight as a drum. They only had a spin up or two left, before the bearings seizes, or something else did.

Generally the only soldering that is required is on the motor, everything else should have a connector.

And maybe it's just easy for me, I work on surface mounted components all the time. I still don't think there is too much that is tricky, I'll have to tear one apart and check. And I only suggested it as a possible solution if the other things didn't work, as opposed to sending it out for data salvage which can cost A LOT of money. And if you had anything that might be considered borderline legal on that drive, you could bet there would be questions!

[The village idiot]

OK..... Just pulled apart 2 drives!

One old Samsung 3.2 GB. 4 phillips head screws, 2 connectors. No soldering!

Next a fairly new WesternDigital 120GB with 8MB cache (an SE drive). 4 T8 torx screws, no connectors to mess with. This drive has spring loaded fingers that connect to gold pads on the board. Not even a warranty sticker in the way. No soldering.

Both drives, NO PROBLEM! The controler board comes right off. As long as you have the exact same model of drive, there should be NO differences. There should be nothing about the drive platters stored on the board (bad sectors, etc.) that stuff is almost always stored in a (semi)protected area of the platters.

This is how many recovery companies do the job. If that doesn't work, then it is off to the clean room. They disassamble the drive. Take the platters out, and mount them in a new housing with a new motor and new heads. Then they may have to use recovery software to scan the platters bit by bit, and reconstruct whatever they can. Rumor has it, you can use things like scanning electron microscopes to read the bits off of the platters. Don't really know how that whole thing works, but I'm sure that it could be done. Even if you had to put some kind of material to stick to the magnetic parts (we'll call them the 1's) and didn't stick to the non-magnetic parts (call them the 0's). Just like splicing Quad video tapes.(well sort of )

And as far as the soldering little tiny components, I really do work with them all the time. Sometimes, nearly daily as I repair equipment at a TV station for a living. That may be why I jump to tearing something apart without hesitation. Hell, if I had a drive that I needed to recover, I might almost go buy a new (of the same drive) one, and bring it back for a refund when I was done recovering the data. It would be very difficult to tell if the board had been out and then replaced. As long as it worked when it was returned, no one would be able to tell.

[gmatov]

Village,
You're a few up on me, there. I look at those tiny little surface mount components on, say, a MOBO, and it's "Oh-oh, into the busted bin." I sure don't have the skill to try unsoldering, resoldering a grain of rice back in. And grain of rice is big for some of them.
You probably have a point there, that the controller is removable, so a drive could be fixed with just a parts swap, else it would be too expensive for them to honor a warranty without a major hassle. Never have torn one apart like that. Have a bunch of junkers, should at least experiment with a couple.
Thanks for the info.

[The village idiot]

When you have some time, you should pull one of those junkers apart. It's kind of interesting inside. And it makes a neat paper weight for a while. Tear it right down to the platters. It will never work again, but if it is a junker anyway, all you have is some time (not like you have much of that lately).

[gmatov]

Village,
I had lots of spare time before my newest g'son was born this past Saturday. Now, it seems I'm always on the way to his house or back home.

I've got half a dozen brands of junkers, all different in design, depending on age, even within brands.
My funniest prob with HDDs was trying to replace a laptop drive for a daughter. All the replacement IBMs were physically too big. Then I learned they put a small drive into a case for that particular line. Dummy! Fine after that,
George
Hell, I'm on my way there right now.