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Need your help techies - hard drive failure for my best friend's widow

Started by area51drone, November 08, 2013, 05:56:49 AM

area51drone

My best friend died in July, and his wife was left with a hard drive that contained all the pictures that they had taken of each other over the years.  It's a seagate 3 terrabyte drive.  Unfortunately it was/is dead.  It literally did not turn on at all when I got it.

I replaced the 5volt TVS diode on the controller board, and I was able to get it to spin up, and even get recognized by a pc, but after the necessary drivers get installed and it says "ready to use" no drive is actually added to the system.   It is listed on the device manager under disk drives and says it is functioning properly.  It is not listed under the windows disk manager.

I downloaded SeaTools, which recognizes the drive, and ran the long generic test, which failed.   The advanced tests say they might destroy data, which I definitely do not want to happen considering how precious the data is to her (and to all of his family/friends).

Any idea on what might be going on here or how I might be able to save the drive?

Thanks in advance...


My friend Chae
(postimage seems to be flaky so you might not see his picture)

onan

Quote from: area51drone on November 08, 2013, 05:56:49 AM
My best friend died in July, and his wife was left with a hard drive that contained all the pictures that they had taken of each other over the years.  It's a seagate 3 terrabyte drive.  Unfortunately it was/is dead.  It literally did not turn on at all when I got it.

I replaced the 5volt TVS diode on the controller board, and I was able to get it to spin up, and even get recognized by a pc, but after the necessary drivers get installed and it says "ready to use" no drive is actually added to the system.   It is listed on the device manager under disk drives and says it is functioning properly.  It is not listed under the windows disk manager.

I downloaded SeaTools, which recognizes the drive, and ran the long generic, which failed.

Any idea on what might be going on here or how I might be able to save the drive?

Thanks in advance...

Man if there was ever a time I wished I was a techie, it's now.

Foodlion

Did you try one of these? HD to USB and see if it's possible to save the files on the HD, before attempting to reformat.
I had to use this method to fix a bad Hal.dll file on my neighbors PC. You only need to watch your power. First time the HD ran too much and shut my PC down, so keep anything that's not needed (Speakers, Programs, or anything else external).

I'd say you may not have much of an option at this point, but I'm sure there's a lot more people that know this sort of thing than myself. I'm still at the noobish self-tought tech stage

area51drone

Quote from: Foodlion on November 08, 2013, 06:13:24 AM
Did you try one of these? HD to USB and see if it's possible to save the files on the HD, before attempting to reformat?
I had to use this method to fix a bad Hal.dll file on my neighbors PC.

I'd say you may not have much of an option at this point, but I'm sure there's a lot more people that know this sort of thing than myself. I'm still at the noobish self-tought tech stage

Yeah, I actually have a little adapter that is really useful for testing drives.  If I can get the drive revived, I'll put it in a new external case for her (after I pull everything off of it!) , but right now its just a bare drive.     

Highly recommend anyone get this if you don't have something similar:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

EDIT: FUCK.. I think I just answered my own question.   This thing says it only supports up to 2TB..      Shopping newegg now.    Will let you guys know, thanks

Was the hard drive in GPT?

You might try using an external hard drive case and then connecting to your computer.

area51drone

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on November 08, 2013, 06:16:00 AM
Was the hard drive in GPT?

You might try using an external hard drive case and then connecting to your computer.

See fuck edit above....  I'll let you guys know if I need more help.  Thank you for the quick responses.

Foodlion

Quote from: area51drone on November 08, 2013, 06:15:53 AM
Yeah, I actually have a little adapter that is really useful for testing drives.  If I can get the drive revived, I'll put it in a new external case for her (after I pull everything off of it!) , but right now its just a bare drive.     

Highly recommend anyone get this if you don't have something similar:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812232002

EDIT: FUCK.. I think I just answered my own question.   This thing says it only supports up to 2TB..      Shopping newegg now.    Will let you guys know, thanks
Damn, talk about tech porn. I want one of those! it's like everything bundled into 1

area51drone

Yeah it's a sweet little adapter.  The box doesn't say it only goes to 2TB, so pulling up the newegg page might have just solved what's going on... 

I think you might have tried to get the drive to work on a motherboard that is not GPT compatible. You might be able to put it back in its original comp and it will work?

area51drone

Quote from: Mind Flayer Monk on November 08, 2013, 06:27:38 AM
I think you might have tried to get the drive to work on a motherboard that is not GPT compatible. You might be able to put it back in its original comp and it will work?

I don't have the original computer, she lives a few hundred miles away from me.   But maybe.  The system I was trying it on is a couple of years old, running vista 64.   No matter though the adapter was probably not going to work anyway.    I'm afraid if I put it back in the original enclosure, it might blow it again.   I'll test the power supply and see if it's stable with a load.

Crap, she didn't give me the usb cable for it, and it's some new type of usb jack I've never seen.

I'm going to order this up:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119279


Foodlion

Quote from: area51drone on November 08, 2013, 06:30:43 AM

Crap, she didn't give me the usb cable for it, and it's some new type of usb jack I've never seen.

Maybe a Firewire port?

area51drone

Quote from: themudking on November 08, 2013, 06:48:46 AM
try these steps:

http://lifehacker.com/5982339/diy-data-recovery-tricks-for-when-your-hard-drive-goes-belly-up


Thanks mudking, but I think I am going to be okay once I get the adapter that supports bigger drives.  There's no clunking or clicking, which is a good sign.   I think that diode blew because of a voltage spike perhaps from a static spark or something.   The external drive adapter she gave me was actually just something you stick on a desk out in the open.  I think it's meant for people who do computer repair work but my friend probably thought it looked cool and didn't take precautions to protect the drive from static charges, or maybe during her move from California back to Washington, it got hit with static, I don't know.


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