Posted: 11/2/2008 1:33:27 PM EDT
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Have a 5yo Maxtor 120gb HD, EIDE interface. It is in two partitions, a 6GB primary in FAT32 with the OS and a ~112GB secondary with all my data in NTFS.
The disk controller (I thought the one on the motherboard, but now I'm not sure) flaked and overwrote the FAT tables in the primary partition, but the secondary seemed fine. Unfortunately, with the motherboard acting flaky, I couldn't back it up immediately. I had to move the raw data to a second drive (hooked up through a SATA-to-USB connector), but the motherboard dragged the speed down to USB1.1, which took over a day just to do just the 6GB partition. I finally picked up a second USB adapter (EIDE-to-USB) and tried to connect both drives through my laptop. Unfortunately, now the Maxtor drive is showing weird read errors. It's like the whole platter is offcenter or something. The disk label that shows up is something like "Saxtqr $ $ $ $ $ $ $" (instead of "Maxtor"), and neither partition shows up at all. Trying to do it through Linux instead, I cannot get anything off the drive at all using "dd if=/dev/sdc". The drive shows up on that device, but I can't mount any partitions, and I can't even get the thing to read even as a raw device. Any ideas????? I got everything off the primary partition that I need, mostly it was just the OS. But the secondary has all of my vacation photos, tax documents, e-books, and a gazillion other things that I really NEED (especially the damn taxes). I have a second Maxtor drive of exactly the same vintage (they were purchased together). Is there any hope at all of being able to read the platter if I physically move it from the bad drive to the good one? How about if I just swap the controller boards on the drives (used to be able to do that 20 years ago)? Is this a candidate for the "freeze it and spin it one last time" trick? I'm guessing not, since it is more likely the electronics than anything else. |
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The drive controller is on your drive, that's where the name EIDE or IDE comes from, Integrated Drive Electronics.
You will not be able to swap platters with success either, but there are companies that do that kind of low-level work. Usually $500+ just to get the drive in the door with no guarantee. Face it, your data is probably toast and you've learned a valuable lesson regarding the importance of backups. BTW, I own several of those same drives and have had two fail in the past 4 years. Mine were in a RAID 0 mirror though. 
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The drive controller is on your drive, that's where the name EIDE or IDE comes from, Integrated Drive Electronics. So, can I unsolder the board from one drive and resolder it to the other? It looks like there are only four wires connecting the board to the big metal brick that the drive mechanism/platter is contained in. Unless there's a second set of wires underneath, or the old-style contact points (like there used to be 20 years ago) underneath. You will not be able to swap platters with success either, but there are companies that do that kind of low-level work. Usually $500+ just to get the drive in the door with no guarantee. Any suggestions for companies to contact? Face it, your data is probably toast and you've learned a valuable lesson regarding the importance of backups. BTW, I own several of those same drives and have had two fail in the past 4 years. Mine were in a RAID 0 mirror though. Well, congratulations. I'm not in the same spot, unfortunately. "probably toast" isn't really useful to me; I would like to get the data back if possible. |
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The drive controller is on your drive, that's where the name EIDE or IDE comes from, Integrated Drive Electronics. So, can I unsolder the board from one drive and resolder it to the other? It looks like there are only four wires connecting the board to the big metal brick that the drive mechanism/platter is contained in. Unless there's a second set of wires underneath, or the old-style contact points (like there used to be 20 years ago) underneath. If you remove the screws from the board it should lift straight up. There are the 4 connections you mention which go to the spindle motor. They should connect with leaf-type spring contacts underneath, no soldering required. Besides that connector there should be another with many more contacts underneath like you said. Those go to the head servo and heads. Go ahead and try to swap boards, it might work. It might also not work because the low-level formatting was done from the drive's original board, not the new one. I don't know, but I'd guess that there are enough variances between boards for it to not work. ETA: I just thought of other ideas why swapping boards might not work. Bad spots on the platters are normal and are marked as bad during the low-level format. If this or any other platter-specific information is stored in NVRAM on the board then swapping would be really bad. I suggest you contact a data recovery service if it's important. You will not be able to swap platters with success either, but there are companies that do that kind of low-level work. Usually $500+ just to get the drive in the door with no guarantee. Any suggestions for companies to contact? OnTrack used to be the biggest and best but there are lots of companies out there now. Do a Google on "data recovery" and such. OnTrack is http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/ Face it, your data is probably toast and you've learned a valuable lesson regarding the importance of backups. BTW, I own several of those same drives and have had two fail in the past 4 years. Mine were in a RAID 0 mirror though. Well, congratulations. I'm not in the same spot, unfortunately. "probably toast" isn't really useful to me; I would like to get the data back if possible. Good Luck! |
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Quoted:
Quoted:
The drive controller is on your drive, that's where the name EIDE or IDE comes from, Integrated Drive Electronics. So, can I unsolder the board from one drive and resolder it to the other? It looks like there are only four wires connecting the board to the big metal brick that the drive mechanism/platter is contained in. Unless there's a second set of wires underneath, or the old-style contact points (like there used to be 20 years ago) underneath. You will not be able to swap platters with success either, but there are companies that do that kind of low-level work. Usually $500+ just to get the drive in the door with no guarantee. Any suggestions for companies to contact? Face it, your data is probably toast and you've learned a valuable lesson regarding the importance of backups. BTW, I own several of those same drives and have had two fail in the past 4 years. Mine were in a RAID 0 mirror though. Well, congratulations. I'm not in the same spot, unfortunately. "probably toast" isn't really useful to me; I would like to get the data back if possible. Relying on recovering data is a bad idea. It's a crapshoot at best. Habitual backups would be useful to you. |
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Relying on recovering data is a bad idea. It's a crapshoot at best. Habitual backups would be useful to you. Yeah, habitual backups are great, until you find out that it was the controller on the motherboard that was bad, and that all of your backup DVDs for several months have errors on them. And THEN you find out that the disk drive that still holds all the data is now having problems in ITS onboard electronics. The much-vaunted hive mind has failed me on this one. Zero information, just hindsight advice. Oh well. |