Hello to one and all,

 

I need help and lots of it,

 

The story so far,

Bought swmbo a new PC for Christmas, and said I would take it to a computer shop to have the contents of the old drive put on to the new machine.

 

Shop said old drive is dead, me well it was ok when I took it out of the old PC. (Yes I know it should have been backed up but it was not.)

 

So does any body know anyone who might be able to retrive the data at a sensible price, as all my wife life is on the old drive?

 

The drive is:-

 

Hitachi 1TB Sata, dated Nov 2009,  part no looks like -  OF10383JPT39C0C9B

 

Thanks to all in advance

 

Mayoboat

 

Merry Christmas

Are you sure the drive is dead?

 

Get yourself a USB caddy or HDD dock and plug the drive into the new computer yourself, then navigate x:\documents and settings\username or c:\users\username where x is the drive letter assigned to the drive by the new computer, and the first path is for Windows XP and the latter for Windows 7 upwards.

 

Would not be the first time I've seen a computer shop declare a fully functioning drive dead because it did not work in their kit.

Edited 21 December, 201510 yr by mannyo

Unless you dropped it, or pulled it "live", it is unlikely to have died. I have swapped my 2009  Hitachi 1TB between PCs about 4-5 times without issue.

 

I presume this is a shop bought PC, so you dont want to take the side off and  plug the drive in as a spare? You can get a USB/SATA converter cable (has a small pcb to sperate out the power to a SATA cable), that will let you plug into a USB port if you just want to transfer the data, usually cheaper than a caddy; personally I would just take the side off of the new PC and plug it in - leave it hanging, or rested upright on the bottom of the case until you are finshed if you dont want to keep it

 

And if you dont want to keep it, can I have it?? I am rebuilding a slightly less decrepit PC for my soon-to-be 3 y/o, as her pre-Millennium computer isnt up to the task of playing 720p copies of Tinga Tinga without stuttering.

If it spins, you might be ok by putting it in a caddy or setting it up as in internal on another machine. If it is recognised you should be able to get the stuff off.

 

If it doesn't spin or there is an issue with the HDD controller, it is a specialist job - they might be able to get the data off by careful surgery.

Hmm you can never tell but this sort of thing does happen. A disk that's just about to go gets tipped over the edge by the movement of taking to the shop / removing it from the machine.

 

Suggestions above are fair.

 

If you're comfortable you can power it up in your machine and you will be able to feel it spin by touching it.

 

As above sometimes putting in a caddy will work.

 

More extremely if you can find a second identical drive you can switch the circuit control boards.

 

Plenty of companies on line can recover disks but can't recommend one. The only ones I have used a full forensic labs.

I'd try putting the drive in a USB drive tray too.

 

If that doesn't work there are a few other things you can try, but drive is dead could mean many things if it's just a guy in a shop saying it without detail of why they say that.

Hi

 

Replay to all the above posts:-

 

I have put the drive backinto the original case and all that happens is that it says no data and boot from startup disk.

 

 

This does not work, as when the starty up cd finishes loading cant find the Disk

 

The drive is not spinning 'cause if you put your dinty digits on it no vibs.

 

Looking at trying to find an old drive that works (same as the one taken out ) and swopping  the pcb. Any thoughts on this?

 

SWMBO not a very happy bunny, She might talk to me by Christmas!

 

Its not a problem puting the unit into the new case as it is an O M E computer that you can add bits to. I have not tried this as of yet.

 

 

Thanks guys and girls

 

Mayoboat

Edited 21 December, 201510 yr by Mayoboat

Check the jumper is set as master

No jumpers on SATA drives.

If what's on there is worth spending money on, then http://www.retrodata.co.uk are very good.

If it's not spinning up then you may be lucky with the logic board from another identical drive, but if you didn't feel confident copying files from one PC to another then it's probably not a DIY task.

No jumpers on SATA drives.

Missed it was SATA

it might be worth emailing Hitachi UK and asking if they can help with either rescuing the data, or sourcing a replacement board; I THINK the Hitachis came with a 5 year warranty, so you have been very unlucky in it dying so young, mine is certainly still going strong with a "Green" rating from SMART, despite being loaded to bursting point with films, music, and TV shows almost from the day I bought it.

 

While on the subject of sudden death, I was reading a longevity test of some 256GB  SSDs and came across something slightly scary; most of the drives worked far beyond their rated life expectancy ré read/write cycles, but the Intel drive uses a count down system that "kills" the drive when it reaches zero, regardless of the number of reserve sectors or SMART errors. It should have gone to "read only mode" but somehow it got killed killed - no longer recognised, and all data lost, similar things happened to a couple of other drives when they were supposed to go "read only".

 

The Samsung 840 died after ~700Terabytes, but a number of the drives went on to break the 1 Petabyte mark, with 1 reaching over 4 Petabytes!!

Give "Drive Fitness Test" a search, it's an IBM / Hitachi specific tool.

 

Failing that, the computer shop I work with in the other business can pull some pretty impressive stuff off. If you're stuck, I can ask.

Failing that, the computer shop I work with in the other business can pull some pretty impressive stuff off. If you're stuck, I can ask.

 

Hi Steve ,

I would be more than happy if you asked.

 

Mayoboat

You really need to back up with SSDs. With spinning rust you have lots of options for recovery, it's much much harder with SSD.

 

To the OP if the data on the disk is very precious don't fanny about with it. Send it to a pro.

 

You'd probably need some special screwdriver bits to take off the boards anyway.

I hope the data is recoverable - I learned the hard way to make sure I had it backed up

 

I would suggest backing every thing up on a regular basis no matter whether it is spinning rust or SSD (and preferably twice so there is redundancy - remember one is none, two is one).

 

I have my back up strategy worked out after a failure a few years back killed 5 years of family photo's, letters etc. My pc has an SSD for system/programmes, one HDD for data and an internal HDD for backup.

 

I have the windows media and all the programme discs available so I can get them all back up and running without too much issue (just time in reloading and updating them). All data is backed up internally and to a NAS drive so I should be able to get everything back on. All told barring complete disaster ie a house fire or similar (in which case I have worse to worry about than photo's etc) I should be able to get it back up and running in a few hours.

^^ this.

 

Thankfully (touch wood) I've never lost any data - however, having worked in IT for many years, I've seen plenty of people who have and don't want it to happen to me. In total, I have one copy on my home PC and one copy on my Macbook, both of which I can work with as they're unencrypted. Editing a file syncs it to the other system, and SpiderOak. My home PC also duplicates them to my home NAS and work desktop via Crashplan (encrypted).

 

So one copy is in Crashplan on my home NAS and enables LAN-speed restores for a simple disk failure. In the event the house catches fire, one copy is in Crashplan on my work desktop, so I could bring a laptop to work and do a LAN-speed restore there. If everything else fails, or my house and the office catch fire simultaneously, then I also have a copy on SpiderOak's cloud storage which would enable a complete (but slow) restore. Some people think I'm a bit paranoid about it, and that it's completely unnecessary - however they soon change their mind when they bring me broken hard drives and there's nothing I can do about it...

 

As for your current predicament, I can only echo what other people have said. Hard drive engineering is precision engineering. Different PCB may have a different firmware revision, you simply cannot know what that would do to your data given that it's all closed source. If this is in any way valuable then let the pros who make their living doing this take a look at it. It won't be cheap, but you'll get an idea of what's possible and an expectation of costs, and can make your informed decision then. DIYing it has the potential to make things worse and you may be looking at an unrecoverable drive and a very frosty significant other.

Sober tail, but I have a solution . I always partition my main HD as XP/w7 /store and lately as W10 .Store  gets copied to a cheap HD. Plenty of "clean pull HD" on e bay.I use at least two to store a backup of my data on to a sit on the shelf HD, which I update regularly.

 

 

SWMBO not a very happy bunny, She might talk to me by Christmas!

 

 

Why is she angry with YOU because SHE failed to back up her data?!? Haha!

Why is she angry with YOU because SHE failed to back up her data?!? Haha!

 

 

NEVER question a womans logic.

 

(Just ask Auric).

I'm a woman, so I'm allowed to question it!

Hi to all,

 

Thank you all for your solutions and comments, My good lady has a contact in the MIT Dept. where she used to work before retirement . He has sent off for an idendtical drive from the US and will swap the pcb over and try to get the drive to power up.

I will let you know what happens next, but it will be a little while as it is from the States.

Price for the new drive, postage and packing £30.00. If I get it done for that I'm laughing....

 

Mayoboat

I have a drive suddenly showing "Yellow" in SMART; a Seagate Barracuda. EVERY drive I have had fail is a Seagate, the others keep on going till I throw them away. Last year I checked for data then threw away a dozen HDDs from Hitachi, IBM, Western Digital etc, and all of them still worked.

I am not saying they were old, but capacities ranged from 20GB down to 850MB

If you're DIYing it, there is at least one youtube vid showing recovery of a HDD. Driver board failure is one problem, heads stuck on the surface is another.

 

 

J.

Please note, the bjorked drive is a SEAGATE!!!!