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.

[bob_a_builder]

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

[Graham M]

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.

[Kymmy]

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

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

Originally Posted by bob_a_builder

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

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 ----------

Originally Posted by Kymmy

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

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.

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

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

Originally Posted by Chris

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

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

Originally Posted by David F

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

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.

[Kymmy]

Originally Posted by Chris

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

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

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..

Originally Posted by Kymmy

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

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.

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.

[haydnwalker]

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

Originally Posted by haydnwalker

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

The last three prices for the drive / disk that matches your query closest:
Price 1: £277.66
Price 2: £295.16
Price 3: £309.06

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

[boroboi]

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