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BAD NEWS: Hard Drive Failure - Art Lost
12 years ago
While I was spending a week up in the San Jose bay area, my laptop stopped detecting its hard drive. Now, this laptop is where I did all of my work, and there was a lot of in-progress artwork at stake inside, so I took it to Fry's Electronics yesterday to have them take a look at it and see if they could recover those sectors. Unfortunately, I just got a call from them telling me that they can't access the drive either, so for now it looks like all of that work is lost for now, unless any of you have any ideas (which I would greatly appreciate). Right now I'm looking at new laptops to get started again, after which I'll be spending some time getting the new laptop filled with all the necessary software before I can start drawing and streaming again. Anyway, just wanted to let you guys know why some of my in-progress art either might not make it or might take a while longer to get done.
I gotta admit, I'm pretty upset about it because there was a lot of good work in there, but I'm more upset with myself for not backing up my work on an external hard drive. Captain Hindsight, save me! :c
I gotta admit, I'm pretty upset about it because there was a lot of good work in there, but I'm more upset with myself for not backing up my work on an external hard drive. Captain Hindsight, save me! :c
sorry for all the work lost
I hear that recovery is expensive because it's labor and time intensive and need a clean room and precise tools to blahblahblah.
If the entire drive is not-recognized by more than one computer's BIOS:
Try:
If SATA -
Change drive mode in BIOS (IDE/AHCI)
If PATA -
Try changing mode jumper.
On both, stage two doom:
Get as close to exactly the same drive as possible, then swap out the controller board on the bottom of the drive and pray to several deities. This generally requires a relatively small torx bit and is about the only chance of hope.
The closer the drive is to Exactly The Same Thing, the better chance of success.
If the drive is not recognized in BIOS, that circuitry is bad.
Going to Fry's has a chance of losing money. They may have looked at it for free, butt chances are they charged to say they tried and could do nothing.
If the board was fried by the computer, a new drive placed into the computer will fry too. Moot point.
If the board was fried by the drive (which is highly unlikely), it's still a moot point. Place board back on new drive and return to store for refund.
Torx bit: $1.99
Drill? O.o Wow... You kids and yer drills. Back in my day we bought a -screwdriver- and turned it with our hands! (Oh, hey, look! Screwdriver handle to take a bit. $5.99)
Both are also returnable for a refund in the event of failure.
< $100 (Usually < $80) refundable investment and some work effort to have a good chance to recover. I've done it often enough. The usual culprit in the failure is electronic wear and tear or power fluctuations. It's up to the user how much the data is worth to them. May not be worth $1000's for DriveSavers, but may be worth a hundred.
But yeah, I'm aware that everything has a cost, but what's to say he'll be able to do a board switch?
And you seem to be forgetting about the cost of the new Hard drive itself; and if you happen to break that board trying to swap it; that's... whatever it cost to buy the darn thing down the drain (as I presume removing whatever = void warranty?)
Considering I've never done such a procedure, I'm probably talking horse-sh*t; but from my experience with technojunk things like (current) boards & circuitry are OTT Sensitive and piss easy to break/damage. :P
Not disagreeing on the point it's a feasible idea though (and I'd potentially do it myself too); just the thought of loosing more money is... bleh. y'know?
...unless of course a cheap shabby shit 20GB hard drive's board is usable(?), in which case... DOOO IIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEET!
And it's personal preference on the new drive item. The store is liable to take the return within 14-30 days without knowing you did anything odd to the new drive unless you lose a screw or really mess up the board. Sadly, no, it does have to be as identical a drive as possible, since the data on addressing the drive is necessarily stored on the board.
The good news is that the process is relatively painless. The contact to the head inside is "contact"-based (just stick the right board in the right place) and the spindle is generally a flat-cable which just slides out and back in. Four to six torx screws, unhook the spindle motor ribbon. Repeat on other drive. Hook spindle motor ribbon into new board. Place board so screw holes line up. Insert screws. Connect. Pray that it's not a spindle motor failure instead.
If it works, Yay!!
If not, remove board from dead drive, re-apply to new drive, new drive should be fine. :)
No need for new drive? (Recovered data, failed to recover data, killed drive?) Make sure it's put together properly and return to store. "Doesn't work, I need to do some research on what to get instead."
This is why I'm always bugging my friends to diligently back up their data to an external (to the point of annoyance). It gives me no pleasure in saying, "I told you so," in these cases. :<
1. When you turn the laptop on, can you hear the HDD spin up?
2. The connector on the HDD may be a finicky little sh*t; so wiggling either the SATA power cable/data cable might get a response (if you can; try this in a desktop)
3. While not a fix, you can get a DVD drive replacement caddy and install two hard-drives.
Sorry to hear it crapped out on you though. Is never a good feeling. :/
Entire thing is up to you and how badly you want or need the data on the drives. In my case, I was working to recover four years' worth of writing compounded by a failed backup.