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hard drive data recovery on smoked hard drive!

post #1 of 14
9/21/05 at 8:42pm
Thread Starter 
does anyone know how much it would cost for a company to recover data from a smoked hard drive? this happend a year or so back but its an 80gig with my life on it! pictures, my first website HTLM docs. (replaceable Mp3s lol) and videos.. anyhow I had the drive in this external hard drive enclosure by "ADS tech" anyhow.. I dont know what went wrong but the hard drive just fried itself... smelled and saw a small puff of smoke.
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post #2 of 14
9/22/05 at 10:14pm
To recover 80GB of data, it would cost thousands of dollars from a professional data recovery place. I had to do it about 5 years ago for the company I was working for. Charged $500 to recover a measly 120 MB of data from a toasted HD.

Here's something you can try as an alternative:

Find out where the smoke came from. IF it came from the circuit board underneath the drive (look for burn marks) then get the EXACT same drive as the one you're trying to get the data off of. Swap the circuit boards. You'll probably need a T5 torx bit or hex bits. If your drive is 'out of production' try ebay. you should be able to get older working HD for a song there.
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post #3 of 14
9/22/05 at 11:31pm
Ouchers...
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post #4 of 14
9/22/05 at 11:40pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Labmouse
Here's something you can try as an alternative:

Find out where the smoke came from. IF it came from the circuit board underneath the drive (look for burn marks) then get the EXACT same drive as the one you're trying to get the data off of. Swap the circuit boards. You'll probably need a T5 torx bit or hex bits. If your drive is 'out of production' try ebay. you should be able to get older working HD for a song there.
The logic board might have to matchi the same firmware as the old one.

If it's not the circuit board that's fried, try freezing it for 10 minutes.
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post #5 of 14
9/23/05 at 2:47am
Quote:
Originally Posted by mich43L
The logic board might have to matchi the same firmware as the old one.

If it's not the circuit board that's fried, try freezing it for 10 minutes.
Not necessarily always, and if you know which firmware your old drive had, you could always find the old firmware off the web and flash the new drive. It's something that he can try that won't cost thousands of dollars, and it's something the pros try themselves. Pulling platters is a last resort.
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post #6 of 14
9/23/05 at 9:00am
Quote:
If it's not the circuit board that's fried, try freezing it for 10 minutes.
whatdoes freezing it do?

Quote:
It's something that he can try that won't cost thousands of dollars, and it's something the pros try themselves. Pulling platters is a last resort.
heh unless your a pro, DON'T try to pull the platters yourself. (experience talking)
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post #7 of 14
9/24/05 at 2:50pm
Did you try removing the HDD and putting it in another enclosure? Perhaps it's only the enclosure that fried and not the HDD.
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post #8 of 14
9/24/05 at 8:41pm
Thread Starter 
hmm thanks for the advise guys..

odious... the drive wont work in anything anymore.

btw what does freezing it do? I remember back in the mid 80s... my parents had a Kenwood stereo system and the stereo tuner broke.. I just remember picking it up from the "tv\stereo repaire shop" and they had it in the freezer!
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post #9 of 14
9/26/05 at 2:35am
I'm not sure how to do this with a notebook drive but I had to do it with a desktop computer ...
there are some programs out there that you can use to get data off a dead drive. I'm not sure how dead the drive is but mine wouldnt work anymore but using a program I could still read some stuff off the drive.

I think I used file scavenger or hmmm theres a ton of programs out there some let you see what you can recover then charge you if you actually want to recover.
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post #10 of 14
9/29/05 at 11:44pm
Thread Starter 
well I found the same hard drive at target.. 80gig westerndigital w\ 8mb cache!! bought it and swapped out circuit boards (mine was blown on a square circuit) and it didnt work.. My guess is this one is too new of a drive. its board it slightly smaller and its 1\4 lighter then my drive.

oh well..
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post #11 of 14
9/30/05 at 8:47am
For 30 bucks on ebay I bought an USB enclosure for my laptop. It comes apart very easily and allows the external HDD to be plugged in remotely and very much exposed. It also has two USB plugs on one end so that if you have older USB ports on the lappie you can plug both in to ensure there's enough voltage to drive the HDD. (I thought that was BS, but it actually works on my older Gateways with the 1.1 USBs.)
I suggest you get one of these things to start with.
Removing the platters from the chassis of the HDD is a big mistake. It's about the only variable that you can be sure of...that the platters are properly aligned and weighted with no variance between the armatures as they slide across.
You really do need the exact same model HDD to swap the circuit boards.
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post #12 of 14
9/30/05 at 1:04pm
Is it detected by the BIOS? If the BIOS sees the drive, it could be bad sectors or a bad partition.

You could try http://grc.com/spinrite.htm to fix the bad sectors and then read what you can.

If the partition is toast, you can use http://www.data-recovery-software.net/ to read what data you can off the drive.

Again, this all depends on whether or not your BIOS sees your hard drive.

As Goldbeater said, to swap the logic board, the drives have to be the EXACT same drive.
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post #13 of 14
9/30/05 at 5:51pm
Thread Starter 
well I took your guys advise and found 1 on Ebay with teh exact part numbers and everything.. only 2 months off the manufacture date. =)
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post #14 of 14
9/30/05 at 7:21pm
Cool! Now you're certain that one does work, right?!
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