Computer hard drive rescue

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pishta

pishta

I know I'm right....
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Not really associated with shops or tools but I use my laptop every night to communicate with you all so its a pretty important tool to me. Anyway....if you got a hard drive that makes your PC not turn on (turns on then turns right off) remove it from system and see if PC powers up without it. If it does, your hard drive controller board has shorted out and the drive is done, nothing you can do to recover the info on it...or is there? I had a 1TB Samsung storage drive chuck full of 4 other smaller HDD backup partitions, each one of them had hundreds or thousands of pictures on them from up to 20 years ago: kids, cars, vacations..... I removed the controller board and found 2 SMD diodes on the backside, right off the connector and found one of them dead shorted power to ground rail. I just clipped the diode right off the board and crossed my fingers. The drive came back to life! (try to replace diode if it doesn't) I quickly put it onto a SATA/USB convertor and started moving all the pics I could find off the drive onto another backup drive on my network. Over the course of 2 days, I was able to search and get every pic off the gasping drive until in the middle of a random game I was transferring, it slowed to 0 throughput and died again, CRC error. Tried replacing the diode but no dice, it was done. I feel I was very lucky to get them off ASAP or they would have been lost. As one radio personality says, "You can't back it up if you haven't backed it up" I recommend SSDs now for working storage, and thumb drives for archival storage. no moving parts. Better would be reputable cloud storage like Google or I-cloud, not some dot com bubble startup that will vanish during the next hiccup. Even burned CD/DVD'd have a shelf life and in 20 years you think spindle storage will even exist? They cant even fit an X-box game on 1 DVD anymore, its just the framework that allows you to download the rest of the content online. Call of Duty : Modern Warfare for X-box just had an update...85G!
 
I try to back up scanned pics. I'm a little behind on that, but need to do it as more photos are scanned and videos are created.
 
pishta said:
Not really associated with shops or tools but I use my laptop every night to communicate with you all so its a pretty important tool to me. Anyway....if you got a hard drive that makes your PC not turn on (turns on then turns right off) remove it from system and see if PC powers up without it. If it does, your hard drive controller board has shorted out and the drive is done, nothing you can do to recover the info on it...or is there? I had a 1TB Samsung storage drive chuck full of 4 other smaller HDD backup partitions, each one of them had hundreds or thousands of pictures on them from up to 20 years ago: kids, cars, vacations..... I removed the controller board and found 2 SMD diodes on the backside, right off the connector and found one of them dead shorted power to ground rail. I just clipped the diode right off the board and crossed my fingers. The drive came back to life! (try to replace diode if it doesn't) I quickly put it onto a SATA/USB convertor and started moving all the pics I could find off the drive onto another backup drive on my network. Over the course of 2 days, I was able to search and get every pic off the gasping drive until in the middle of a random game I was transferring, it slowed to 0 throughput and died again, CRC error. Tried replacing the diode but no dice, it was done. I feel I was very lucky to get them off ASAP or they would have been lost. As one radio personality says, "You can't back it up if you haven't backed it up" I recommend SSDs now for working storage, and thumb drives for archival storage. no moving parts. Better would be reputable cloud storage like Google or I-cloud, not some dot com bubble startup that will vanish during the next hiccup. Even burned CD/DVD'd have a shelf life and in 20 years you think spindle storage will even exist? They cant even fit an X-box game on 1 DVD anymore, its just the framework that allows you to download the rest of the content online. Call of Duty : Modern Warfare for X-box just had an update...85G!
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Don't really know what all this smart people talk is all about but now you're making me think I might be able to save lost pictures on a computer that went out in a blaze of glory.

Hurts because I had pictures from quite awhile back and cars I used to have. When I graduated high school and college. So much and poof gone.

Now I back up everything monthly on external drives and they go in fire/ water proof safes in three different locations
 
They say if you don't have your information in 2 places, it doesn't really even exist.

Main information on your device or computer, and a backup on an external drive.
 
Princess Valiant said:
Don't really know what all this smart people talk is all about but now you're making me think I might be able to save lost pictures on a computer that went out in a blaze of glory.

Hurts because I had pictures from quite awhile back and cars I used to have. When I graduated high school and college. So much and poof gone.

Now I back up everything monthly on external drives and they go in fire/ water proof safes in three different locations
Click to expand...

Hey Rain
I used to do data recovery when I ran my Computer Service Business.

I would take a so called Dead Hard Drive out of failed computer, manually power it up so the drive is spinning, then do a clone copy of the old drive over to a brand new hard drive.

Using Acronis Cloning software, was able to do the clone copy. Then at the end of the cloning process the Acronis Software would rewrite a new "Boot Sector" to the newly cloned drive.

Put the drive back in the original computer and it boots up/starts up again, and there is all the lost data there back to life.

Ready to copy to an external hard drive for safe keeping.

So yes there are a few different variations of how to go about Data Recovery. From basically powering up the drive to read and copy the information from it. To actually clone copying the failed hard drive over to a brand new drive.

If serious about wanting to get your lost data and pictures back, I can give you a hand with that. PM me . . .
 
I had all my Hardtop resto pics, Convertable resto pic, Harley resto pics and Boat resto pics on Photo Bucket. I got a notification I had only enough space for 25 more pics so I joined. The next time I went on my site All my Convertible and Harley pics were gone. I contacted them and they said there was nothing they could do. Dropped them real quick. Wanted the Documentation on my Resto's for if I want to sell it. I have some pics from a home PC but nothing compared to what I had.:BangHead:
 
And if you use your phone as storage better back it up too. My wife lost a ton of stuff of hers.
 
Once upon a time LOL Windows 98 hard drive in my tower refused to start. After I had pushed the power button on and off about 25 times, I called my brother. He said, "I'll have Tim ( his coworker ) give you a call". This Tim guy calls and says, "You need a new hard drive and a six pack by 4:pM Friday. So when he and my brother show up here, Tim removes my hard drive from its mounting, and installs the new one. He turned the still connected original hard drive onto its side in the bottom of the case, started tapping on a spot with screw driver and said, "push the power button". Damn thing started right up! ( Insert mind blown emojie here ) My brother says, "All you needed was Tim and his magic wand". His cloning software, about an hour, and I'm all good again.
A few years later, I tapped to hammered the crap out of one and I couldn't make it start. My brother referenced that Heart-Magic Man song and said, "That aint you". Oh well... Majority of what it held had been saved to disc anyway. Not magic but no long ignert either.
 
About every 3 years I buy a new USB drive, then copy what's on my current drive to it.

That gives me an incremental backup minus new files after the new USB purchase.

Quarterly, I copy the contents of the USB to one of my computer HDDs.

So far this has worked very well, and only jeopardizes the newest (and likely easiest to find/replace files) and then only in the event of both a USB drive fail and a PC fail at the same time.

Back when I supported over 10,000 PCs and 350 server, I would occasionally replace those controller boards with one from a drive with bad media, despite advice from others that it would not work. Most of the time it did.

I've recently discovered a new (to me) tool called "Disk Drill" that does a pretty good job accessing what's left on drives that have issues making them unreadable by windows.
 
YY1 said:
Back when I supported over 10,000 PCs and 350 server, I would occasionally replace those controller boards with one from a drive with bad media, despite advice from others that it would not work. Most of the time it did.
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I never heard of a Samsung HDD so I actually looked into this but couldn't find one in my spares box and the controller board footprint was different from any WD or Seagate or even a Maxtor drive I had. the diode trick worked for me, the drive would not even spool up and would send anything I used for power into protection. Media was crystal clean inside, no crashes evident (if you could see them at all nowadays on a 1TB drive) I tried Linux to access this drive as Windows didnt see it as initialized, then CRC error, then just tossed it. Nothing left on it that was important to me.
 
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