Manual data recovery from a broken hard drive...:(

[MickeyD]

Excellent news and what an awesome thread. You are never too old to learn! Thanks South_Bit!!




/bookmarks this one ....

[copacetic]

Awesome stuff.

[ponder]

I've just started using dropbox since I got my Galaxy S3 so I'm gonna back up my docs there from now on. Must say, it is an awesome service. Date is late btw...

There's also Google Drive, 5GB free which should be more than enough for important documents.
https://drive.google.com/start#home
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/...es-really.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Drive

Access everywhere.
Google Drive is everywhere you are—on the web, in your home, at the office and on the go. So wherever you are, your stuff is just...there. Ready to go, ready to share. Get started with 5 GB free.

Google Drive is available for:
PC and Mac
Chrome OS
iPhone and iPad
Android devices

[biometrics]

Nice!

[SouthBit]

Everyone like a happy ending Nice work.

[Park@82]

That's fantastic.

If you guys fix DJ's drive like this then I'm going to be very impressed!

I'm pretty impressed!

[zophas]

Well done guys! How's this for a usefull forum? Eh?

[HavocXphere]

Shot SouthB...nicely done.

I've just started using dropbox since I got my Galaxy S3 so I'm gonna back up my docs there from now on. Must say, it is an awesome service. Date is late btw...

Careful. Dropbox employees can actually see your data so its a confidentiality issue. Its also not a *backup* solution but rather a sync solution. There have been cases where there was a glitch & dropbox replaced the data with crap...and that gets synced across all devices so it can wipe out all the copies on all your devices. There were a whole bunch of horror stories like that in a HN thread 2 days ago.

Its a great service as you say...but just think carefully about it & don't rely *only* on it.

[DJ...]

I've done the exact same thing before... plugging the wrong power source into the external hard drive. Only happened once before - I learnt my lesson very quickly after that.

Anyway, there is actually a way to fix this (or rather, be able to get the data off), which is the method I used previously to rescue my data However, if you do this, you do it at your own risk...

See, there is a fail safe built into the circuit board of the hard drive itself. In some cases, such as mine, nothing happened to the external enclosure, but the hard drive board fried. Or didn't actually, thanks to the "fail safe". These come in the form of a 12V and a 5V TVS diode. So when you connect an incorrect power supply, hopefully one of these goes (usually the 12V diode), in an attempt to save the hd.

Read this -> http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diode_FAQ.html

So what you might be looking to do is:
1. Remove the circuit board from the hard drive.
2. Look for a tvs diode near the power supply area. In the above link in point 2, there are a couple of identifiers which you can look for to identify the correct diode.
3. Being very careful, use clippers to remove the diode.
4. Reconnect the circuit board to the hard drive itself, plug it in (using the correct power cable) and see whether it is useable.

I think thanks need to go out to wishblade too for initially pointing this out. If it wasn't for this suggestion, I might be on my way to handing over a couple grand for someone to remove a few screws and remove a faulty TVS. (said like an expert, of course )

Thanks wishblade...

[DJ...]

Careful...

Its a great service as you say...but just think carefully about it & don't rely *only* on it.

Noted. Thanks Havoc. This thread is just full of nuggets of wisdom.

And beautiful pics, of course...

[Park@82]

...
Careful. Dropbox employees can actually see your data so its a confidentiality issue. Its also not a *backup* solution but rather a sync solution. ..

With Dropbox I think you'll find safety in numbers, but if the data is that sensitive one option would be to put the files in a password (long password that is not a actual word) protected zip or a True Crypt file as these are very, very hard to crack in my experience. Then upload to google drive, dropbox and skydrive to be tipple sure...


You can use a program like Syncback to zip, password protect and sync a folder to a Dropbox folder...
With syncback you can schedule backups and set it to inert the date on the file name (e.g. filename_%date%.zip)for every backup so that it doesn't overwrite the previous backup...

[The_Librarian]

SouthBit, I could slobberkiss you right now. But considering I'm in Singapore, I'll rather just add a link to your services in my signature. Thank you...

Slobberkisses must come from Ook

[The_Librarian]

Excellent read, good to hear the disk jockey got his data back.

[mercurial]

Awesome stuff, guys. Quick question - I am trying to see what DJ had to clip off. Can anyone link me to an image? I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at. Was it those 2 stuff next to each other that he had to put the multimeter on?

[iAmThePope]

Awesome stuff, guys. Quick question - I am trying to see what DJ had to clip off. Can anyone link me to an image? I don't know what I'm supposed to be looking at. Was it those 2 stuff next to each other that he had to put the multimeter on?

Afaik yeah, one of them is the diode that protected it against the surge.