Hard drive Recovery (Result!)

witnessmenow

Just sharing a bit of info in case it is ever useful to anyone. Its a bit long


A friend of mine said that she had an external hard drive that wasn't working anymore and there was a load of family photos on it (:rolleyes: Guys you can replace movies, music etc but when it comes to photos BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP!)

So I said I'd have a look at it. She told me that the wrong power supply was plugged into the external, so i thought with any luck the caddy circuitry took the hit and didnt pass the extra voltage on to the hard drive. So i opened it up and my hopes were quickly dashed. I plugged it into my PC and my PC wouldnt even power on, the hard drive was obviously bridging ground and one of the + wires.

I thought at this stage there wasn't going to be much I could do, but i thought if the main board is bridging the power supply surely the platters are probably ok. So without really checking it out I went back to my friend with two options

A) Send it to a hard drive recovery place, where it could cost in the region of €1k to get the data back

Possibly replace the main board of the HD

So she asked me to look into B, I thought the chances of finding the same hard drive were slim and none, especially as it was an IDE drive. But I came across a website that gave me some hope

The TL;DR of it is that is hard drive died in due to a faulty PSU overvolted it I guess, He buys the same model hard drive replaces board, doesnt work, boards have different firmwares. Rings around , finds an exact match of his HD and replaces board and it works.

Promising as it at least proved option B was possible but he had a fairy recent hard drive, I didnt.

So I search ebay for the model of the hard drive (ST3500630A btw), and tbh im a bit shocked, there is a crowd in canada selling mainboards for it! Unfortunately the ones listed arent a match but they have a link to an "interactive online guide" for picking hard drives, I put in all the data and they have an exact match.

So it arrived this morning, I swapped it in (simple 6 screws, no soldering or anything like that) and success! I'm currently backing it up to an external as we speak.

~€35 is a pretty good price for data recovery!

bonzodog2

A video on Youtube by someone from a US data recovery company, who seems to know his stuff, suggests getting a circuit board from a drive that is very close in manufacture date to the drive you are trying to recover; this should improve the chances of getting compatible firmware.

witnessmenow

The firmware was printed on the info label in my case so I was able to get a board with identical firmware

techguy

This is amazing stuff..

I had a drive fail on me last year. (my fault, I put my hand inside the case when powered.) You can see on the HD circuit board the IC that is fried. I didn't really look too hard for a replacement circuit.

I still have the drive. It's a WD Cavier IDE. I wonder what my chances are of getting a replacement. Should I hit up ebay and look for a similar hard drive and just swap boards?

Cool post OP!! What eBay seller sold you the mainboard?

witnessmenow

It was this guy, doesn't look like he stocks WD boards though.

Well according to the website that i linked to it needs to be an exact firmware match and all, search for the model number on ebay you might get lucky. Also the website i linked to has a forums section that seems to have a place where you can request mainboards, seems to be fairly active too.

techguy

Cool, thanks for the link. I'll have a look and see what I get.

Cheers!