Reading a damaged hard drive.

happydude13

Having managed to spill orange juice on a laptop
the hard drive seems to no longer work.

Is their anywhere in dublin that can do
a hard drive recovery, that won't cost an
arm and a leg. Or read the contents of the
drive etc...

When I put the hard drive into
a normal pc with a 2.5 -> 3.5 adapter
it confuses the BIOS so

where to go from here ?

The contents of the drive are important
but no that important if ye know what I mean.

Cheers

Redrocket

that sounds a bit strage the hard disk screwing up from a spillage?? ive never heard of it so maybe it is possible, i dont know. i would think it is the ide controller that is gone. try getting someone you know with one of those little external usb hard drives and replace the one in the caddy with yours, then plug into a machine and check it. or try plugging the hard drive into another laptop. its worth a try.

leeroybrown

Try the Hard Disk in the 3.5" -> 2.5" adaptor in your PC with auto detection off. This way your OS will have a chance to try to detect it itself. Also, put it on the IDE cable on it's own to avoid any wierd issues it may have with master/slave/cable-select.

If this doesn't yield a result download your manufacturers drive test/repair tool. Most of them are linked off the UltimateBootCD homepage. If this can detect the drive then it may be able to repair or perhaps identify the problem.

The worst case scenario is that either the controller or electronics is damaged. If this has happened then expensive data recovery is normally the only possibility.

Col_Loki

A mate of mine done something like this (except just broke his entire laptop) and set up the laptop drive as the slave to his regular 3.5" IDE drive (using the adapter mentioned) ............ it worked perfectly and he got all the info back.

Granted it was an old dell (which he has recently also broken) so im not sure if it should be any different. Did you try putting it as a slave?

Tivoli

i was messing with a locked 10 gig seagate 3.5 inch today ( not one of the ones i sold in the forsale section today), and its not soldered to the motors at all, the board is just tightened against the connectors,and i bet your contacts got wet and scum is causing a resistance

if you feel up to a bit of diy, unscrew the board off the drive and clean it with ipa and a cotten swab, especailly all those contact points,screw it on tight and try it again

if you mess it up you could try buying an identical drive and swapping the circut boards, copy your crap onto something more reilable and swap the boards back

and if you mess that up- what can i say except sorry

happydude13

thanks for all the advice.

I've managed to solve the problem although
in a somewhat inelegant fashion.

I put the hard drive in another laptop where the
BIOS didn't complain.

Booted the laptop on Knoppix
which mounted the hard drive

and then I set the document root for apache to
be /mnt/hda1/

Added the laptop to the lan at home

and started winHTTrack, a website downloading
program, on another pc

And it seems to have got everything important.