Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

God, I'm having some bad luck. Yesterday my lappy died, today my backup 400gb external hard drive has died. 10 years of photo memories (our wedding, kids, holidays, late friends and parents etc) gone in a flash. Drive was only 18mnths old.

Anyway, I'm convinced the data and platters are fine, just a case of a fried logic board hopefully.
When I plug a power supply ito it, the supply is shorted. The LED blinks quickly on and off.
When I take it out of the enclosure and put itin a PC, it won't boot. When I use a USB to IDE adaptor cable and plug into the PC's power, it shuts the machine down.
Something shorting out, yes?
A friend gave me his external HDD to look at which also refused to power up. Exactly same symptoms as this - both Seagate Barracudas.

Experts: does this scenario ring any bells?

Long shot: does anyone have a spare Seagate Barracuda ST3400620A 400GB 7200.10 lying about? A data recovery guy once told me to find an identical drive and swap logic boards over.
The thoughts of losing 10 years of our memories makes me physically sick. I thought buying a big, fat, safe drive would have me covered - fat chance.
:(

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

don't know about the seagates, but know that that generally wouldn't work our drives - board and mechanics sync them selves as part of the orgiinal calibration - so chance of one board working on different mechanicals is not good, but may be different with seagates

maybe more productive to get drive out of laptop and plug that into an enclosure and access that from another pc

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

You need to get an identical drive to swap the logic board out but it needs to be an identical model and firmware version and even then you'll be lucky.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Yep sound familiar, certain HDD's are known to destroy logic boards, al long as you have one the same then a board swap isn;t a hard job, the board should be identical but don;t worry about the firmware revision as it shouldn;t effect the way the data's put on the drive and all revisions can read the data from other firmwares (otherwise you;d have to blank your drive when updating it ;)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Thanks lads. Not great news is it.
Can't bear to think of this mess.

Laptop is an insurance job - not worried about that at all. I had the drive out yesterday and got all the data off it.
It's the data on the Seagate I will miss. My little girl from day one..

---------- Post added at 13:51 ---------- Previous post was at 13:50 ----------


I've done it before, aye.
Didn't work tho..
Only one I can find is in the US on eBay.
Gonna have to go for it tho I guess.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

They can be expensive, but perhaps this is a job for a data recovery expert?

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

No offence mate but 10 years of photographs should be backed up either online ie photobucket or similar and on optical media. I hope you manage to get it sorted :)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Deffo. But a 400gb drive is VERY expensive.
Not an option right now unfortunately.

None taken. They were on two drives just a fortnight ago. I emptied one to spring clean and start again when I came back from holiday. The big drive's died since. Sods law.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Last time I quoted for Ontrak to recover a platter the requested amount was £300 setup fee and £100 a GB :(

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Scary isn't it?

I kinda know someone who might be able to do me a deal. In the meantime, I'm on the hunt and open to offers!
I'll have that drive off eBay first..

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

I suspect those sorts of prices are down to this being the sort of service only a business would have been keen to use before now. But with ever-increasing GBs of data now being written as family photo albums, rather than business-critical documents, there has got to be a gap in the market for someone to offer this as a domestic service at an affordable price.

I can't believe that the actual cost of performing this sort of data recovery is anything like that quote. They must be coining it in.

Not that any of this helps in the current situation, except possibly that it might be worth phoning one of these companies, pointing out the potential domestic market to them, and then offering yourself as a willing guinea-pig.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

I agree. Sadly, I think it's a good idea but one I'll not have much joy with - one would think were not the first to think of this and wonder why. Still, anything's worth a go I suppose.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

http://www.fields-data-recovery.co.uk/price-guide.html

That company does no obligation quotes and does discounts for students and non-businesses...

HTH

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Cheaper than expected. Thanks.
I'll bookmark that one.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Considering they're such valuable memories and files, i think those prices would be worth in the long run.

If/when you do get them back, back them up onto DVD aswell and store it

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

I see that site asks for OS but it does not have an option for a none OS drive in the quote doubt it makes much of a difference though.

300 does seem cheap compared to other things ive seen

---------- Post added at 15:08 ---------- Previous post was at 15:04 ----------

I just did an online quote for a drive >250 gig Vista and made a note of none OS hard drive with dead logic board and got

Price 1: £260.10
Price 2: £269.07
Price 3: £299.86

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

You might also want to try LC Technology (0115 959 7904):

http://www.lc-tech.co.uk/services/mediarecovery.html

They created the RescuePro software that's included with all high-end Sandisk cards. This does a good job of recovering scraps of jpegs from a HDD. I've never used their recovery service so I can't comment.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

These guys have just called me.
They reckon with what I've told them they'll almost certainly be able to recover data from the platters for from £200 and no more than £400 for an individual.
They advised against swapping the logic board tho, saying a different revision may make the drive lose it's original state and make recovery harder - and that I should save the price of the drive and out it towards their fee and look at it that way - they have thousands of parts etc. Nice bloke and a nice interesting geeky chat.

---------- Post added at 15:25 ---------- Previous post was at 15:24 ----------

Cheers - I'll have a look.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

And you can check the warranty status of your drive by tapping in the serial number here:

http://support.seagate.com/customer/...validation.jsp

They also do data recovery:

http://services.seagate.com/index.aspx?lng=en-us

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Can`t you do a deleted file recovery on the drive that they used to be on?
That`ll get them back for you. ;)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Thanks both.

Yeah, could do but there was a bunch of my nippers videos and some other bits and bobs that I'd like back too.
I've done some data recovery like this once before on another drive and while some stuff was recovered, most of it was corrupt even after giving them proper extensions etc.
I've had the drive down to a friends tonight and tested the enclosure's electrics and all seems fine with that, so it's deffo looking like the logic board on the HDD has failed. I'm going to go gung ho to try and find a way to sort this before forking out 2-400 notes. Maybe a trip to the local computer fair and see if I can spot an identical HDD.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Talk to Duncan at Retrodata

http://www.retrodata.co.uk/

The guy is the dogz.. and not too expensive. Really, don't mess with the disk yourself, it makes recovery harder more often than not.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

That's Odie isn't it.
I wonder if he'll remember me from the NG's. He's sent me bits for nowt before now.
Good call.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Yup, that's your man. Still doing the business and still surprisingly affordable for domestic work.

:)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Thanks Dai. Can't believe I didn't think of him first.
I dropped him a message in one of the NG's but I'll give him a shout elsewhere if he doesn't respond. Do you know where he frequents (PM if you prefer)? Suppose I could just email him at the site really.
In any case, after much Googling last night for firmwares and whatnot, I bought an identical drive with the correct firmware - seems to be an awful lot of people had success with this, so I'm going to give it a go. Worst case scenario if it doesn't work is I'll have a new 400GB drive to have the recovered data transferred to - I'd have had to buy one of those anyway.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

ebay has a wanted section I think?? Try advertising in there for an identical drive with or without bad sectors.... Also see if there's any (seagate?) forums as someone on there might be able to point you in the right direction...

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Ta. Did all the above last night (eBay's I Want It Now is pretty much hit and miss). Seagate official forums are full of proprietary bum-kissers who won't help anyone wanting to swap boards out coz big bad Seagate say it's naughty. But found loads of others (including http://www.deadharddrive.com) which pointed to lots of occasions where people had successfully done the board swap on Barracudas. Looks like a common problem. Hardest thing was trying to find a drive/board with the right firmware, but googling it found a UK company with one in stock, and as I say, this drive is on it's way now. Hope it saves me a few bob..
:scratch:

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Good luck! Hope I never have to go through this!

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Thanks. I'm determined never to again. I've always been a good backer uppererer. Caught off-guard this time.
Wouldn't mind, I've got 350GB of online server space so I've no excuses (apart from a pathetic upload speed).
One good thing has come of it, some of my friends have decided to go out and buy decent DVDRs and get those photos saved..

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Indeed, I've always backed up to a Maxtor external HDD but I'm going to be putting my entire 13GB iPhoto library onto some DVDs this weekend. :disturbd:

I really hope this works out for you. Please post back here when you get it fixed. :)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

My most important pics are online and on dvd x2 never just trust 1 dvd either

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

No, I know. They can deteriorate badly.
That said, I have some Ritek G03 dye ones that I've had for years now and they seemed to have held up well. Good quality is the key I think.
Be nice if I could just plug into my server and pass over the GB's tho ;)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

If anything I'm too much the other way I guess. I've got about 3Tb spread amongst different machines and formats. USB/eSATA/NAS and just plain old harddisks in different boxes on the local network.

I tend to waste disk space making duplicate copies of copies of important folders, then promise myself I'll get around to sorting it out later. This of course rarely gets done...

Still, better too many than none at all I guess.
:dozey:

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

I have heard the Drobo is a good backup option http://www.amazon.co.uk/Data-Robotic.../dp/B0012L65PU

You have to buy the drives too but they are pretty cheap now and at least that way it is always upgradeable.

When I get some spare cash (is there such a thing?!) I am thinking about getting one.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Looks good but is rather expensive for the fact its just an external RAID array in effect...albeit an "intelligent" one from the blurb.

If i had PLENTY of spare computer cash lying around then I'd consider it but as I don't....then its out of the window.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Expensive is that, especially driveless.
Does look very nice though, but I'd be tempted to do something a bit more DIY if I was to go to that sort of extent.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

A hardware RAID card is a good deal cheaper than that.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

In an ideal world I suppose a hot-swappable RAID5 array would be nice. If a disk dies just rebuild onto a spare and boogie on..

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Oh happy happy joy joy...

New drive arrived, swapped out the logic boards and she's up and running.
370GB of data back for a very reasonable £48 :D
Didn't realise - turns out there was 3503 pics, 7507 MP3's, & 3174 AVI's.
:shocked:

Lesson learned..

Must recommend http://www.ultratecdirect.com and the shipping/tracking system they use (Interlink Express). I've been able to watch this process online from them receiving the customer data to label printing right through to doorstep. Top notch.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

As I said elesewhere don;t trust the repaired driver anymore than the time taken to recover the data... Yes it was £48 but count that as a recovery fee ;)

Really glad though that you;ve recovered the data :) Well done :D

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

:D:D

Backup commencing...

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/search...h=adaptec+raid these are decent budget raid. I would not run an array on anything cheaper bare in mind to run raid 5 you need at least 3 ports

Glad you got the data back dude :)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Congratulations matey!

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

HDD's being very cheap these days can very easily be mirrored (either a hardware raid as DF suggests or simple using windows disk manager) means that if one ever goes down the other will always have the backup..

I'm though an old fashioned Raid5 girl and love nothing better than pulling out a single hotswap to shock a visitor or two ;)

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Ermmm... Who suggested a hardware raid card?

I'm into RAID10+HS myself. A striped array on quad 15k rpm drives fairly screams along!


I'm glad you got this sorted, Kryogenik. Big sighs of relief all round.

Re: Hard drive *experts* - help needed.
 

Heh.
Interesting stuff, just been reading up on RAID.

Now I've got the drive back, I can get to Acronis TrueImage - nice bit of kit is that.
Shame I hadn't used it enough.
;)

---------- Post added at 14:02 ---------- Previous post was at 14:01 ----------

Cheers mate. Big relief indeed.
Thanks for the pointers.
:)