Data recovery from harddrive

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30th September 2009, 11:09 AM
dhicks

Data recovery from harddrive

Hello All,

We have a 1TB SATA Western Digital WD10EADS "WD Caviar Green" harddrive that has conked out. It was in an external USB housing, but I've now removed it from there and tried plugging it in to the SATA port on a PC's motherboard. The PC doesn't recognise the drive - it knows there's some sort of drive there, but that's about as far as it gets. Booting in to SystemRescueCD, Linux can't see any harddrives, so there's no "sda1" or similar listed under /dev.

Anybody any ideas how I can go about fixing this? It strikes me that this is likely to be a physical problem with the drive rather than simple "data corruption" - someone's probably kicked or dropped the drive as it's been floating around on people's desks. I seem to remember people have mentioned replacing the disk's controller - anyone done this, anyone know how easy this is to do? Is it simply a case of buying an identicle drive then unscrewing and swapping a couple of circuit boards?

Is something like SpinRite likly to be of any use, or is that not going to help much if the computer can't even create a /dev device from the drive in the first place?

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David Hicks
30th September 2009, 11:14 AM
mac_shinobi

Quote:

Originally Posted by dhicks

Hello All,

We have a 1TB SATA Western Digital WD10EADS "WD Caviar Green" harddrive that has conked out. It was in an external USB housing, but I've now removed it from there and tried plugging it in to the SATA port on a PC's motherboard. The PC doesn't recognise the drive - it knows there's some sort of drive there, but that's about as far as it gets. Booting in to SystemRescueCD, Linux can't see any harddrives, so there's no "sda1" or similar listed under /dev.

Anybody any ideas how I can go about fixing this? It strikes me that this is likely to be a physical problem with the drive rather than simple "data corruption" - someone's probably kicked or dropped the drive as it's been floating around on people's desks. I seem to remember people have mentioned replacing the disk's controller - anyone done this, anyone know how easy this is to do? Is it simply a case of buying an identicle drive then unscrewing and swapping a couple of circuit boards?

Is something like SpinRite likly to be of any use, or is that not going to help much if the computer can't even create a /dev device from the drive in the first place?

--
David Hicks

Just a thought not sure if it will help or not but can you see it in the bios of the machine and also in the bios have you got LBA enabled ?
30th September 2009, 11:26 AM
Midget

sounds like PCB failure to me. grab a copy of MHDD to confirm this.

Swapping PCBs on a WD is next to impossible. You have to match model, firmware, batch number, swap ROMs and then then it doesn't always work. Getting an identical drive from a DR supplier will also cost you 2x the cost of buying a new drive from eBuyer.

Send it off to a DR place for a free eval is my suggestion. Be careful though, I won't name names in public but there are many I would avoid.
30th September 2009, 11:57 AM
dhicks

Quote:

Originally Posted by mac_shinobi

in the bios have you got LBA enabled ?

It was worth a try - I've just tried the disk in another machine, it still doesn't even recognise there's even a disk there. I can't find an option in the BIOS of this machine for LBA. This disk was working okay inside its USB caddy yesterday and I can't think of any settings or switches or whatever that could be changed to affect it, so I'm inclined to think the disk is just plain bust in some physical way.

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David Hicks
30th September 2009, 12:00 PM
dhicks

Quote:

Originally Posted by Midget

sounds like PCB failure to me.

Drat.

Quote:

grab a copy of MHDD to confirm this.

The "zip" files available on the MHDD don't seem to want to uncompress on Windows with the built-in ZIP handling or 7-Zip - different zip format of some sort?

Quote:

Swapping PCBs on a WD is next to impossible. You have to match model, firmware, batch number, swap ROMs and then then it doesn't always work.

And double drat.

Quote:

Getting an identical drive from a DR supplier will also cost you 2x the cost of buying a new drive from eBuyer.

The disk (rather inadviseably) contained our entire photo archive back to 1953. We'd like that data back...

Quote:

Send it off to a DR place for a free eval is my suggestion. Be careful though, I won't name names in public but there are many I would avoid.

Okay, skipping the bad ones, can anyone recommend a data recovery specialist that knows what they're doing?

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David Hicks
30th September 2009, 12:18 PM
mac_shinobi

I would drop Midget a PM and do it that way am sure he can give you a few places contact details etc etc
30th September 2009, 12:28 PM
Midget

MHDD is a dos boot program. you need to stick it on a CD or Floppy and boot from it.
30th September 2009, 12:30 PM
mac_shinobi

Quote:

Originally Posted by Midget

MHDD is a dos boot program. you need to stick it on a CD or Floppy and boot from it.

any links to this MHDD boot program ?
30th September 2009, 12:44 PM
dhicks

Quote:

Originally Posted by Midget

MHDD is a dos boot program. you need to stick it on a CD or Floppy and boot from it.

Sorry, rather mangled sentance in my previous post there - it was supposed to say "The zip files available on the MHDD website don't seem to want to uncompress on Windows with the built-in ZIP handling or 7-Zip - different zip format of some sort?". The ISO CD image comes archived inside a Zip file that seems to be corrupt / some different Zip format/version that Windows can deal with.

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David Hicks
30th September 2009, 12:46 PM
dhicks

Quote:

Originally Posted by mac_shinobi

any links to this MHDD boot program ?

A quick Google search turned up:

Download MHDD: Bootable CD image, MHDD: Bootable CD image 4.6 Download

Which gave me a working Zip file that produced an ISO file that I could burn to CD and boot a machine from. It still couldn't see the harddrive in question, though, which rather makes me think it is most thouroughly dead.

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David Hicks
30th September 2009, 03:01 PM
Midget

its originally Russian, as is Victoria (a windows version - but that's no use for testing dead drives) if the hddguru link doesn't work then I'm not sure where to get it sorry.
30th September 2009, 05:10 PM
dhicks

Quote:

Originally Posted by Midget

if the hddguru link doesn't work then I'm not sure where to get it sorry.

That brothersoft link above seemed to work just fine, thanks. Still couldn't do anything with the disk, mind.

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David Hicks