A couple of months ago I bought an external hard drive: it was a Seagate 320GB 7200 rpm. Now it’s a paper-weight. I felt that with all the data I had on my PC, it would be a good idea to have some sort of backup. That was the theory anyway. But of course, the practice was quite different. I stored all my data on that drive instead of on my PC.
There was about 200GB of data on that drive. That was until yesterday, when I committed the faux pas of plugging the wrong ac adapter into drive. My laptop uses 19 volts. The hard drive expected 12 volts. No smoke, no bang, just a continuously flashing LED on the drive. And no drive detected by the operating system.
Initially I thought that I may have blown the power board in the drive. So with the aid of a butter knife, I spent 4 hours liberating the drive from its rather sturdy plastic case. That was just so much fun at 2 o’clock in the morning. Now to start testing. So how do I test if the power board was damaged or not? Well I disconnected the drive from the chassis and plugged in the correct adapter. The LED came on and stayed on. Didn’t flash once. Looks like the power board is OK. This is not looking good for the drive.
It wasn’t until I got home today that I could finish my testing. I put the drive into my old PC as a slave drive and started up the PC. Well I tried to start up the system. Nothing happened: as in a “the PC did not even power on” type of nothing. Removed the drive and tried again. Still the PC would not turn on. This is not looking good at all. Whatever I did to the drive, it was obviously a lot worse than I thought. I tried a couple of more times to turn on the PC, and still there wasn’t a flicker of life from it.
Now I’m worried. Not only have I fubared my drive, but my second PC is fubared as well. After removing the power lead and holding down the power button for a few seconds, it eventually starts correctly. Whew! I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.
I don’t really care too much about the drive itself, but I would like to get the data back. My only choices are to send it off to a data recovery specialist, (along with my left arm to cover the cost), or I can try to do the repair myself. I’ll keep an eye out for a logic board for the drive, and if I can get my hands on one, maybe I’ll try to replace it myself.
Or I might just say goodbye to the data, buy a new external drive and smack myself over the head a few times with the old one to remind me to check my adapters the next time I plug it in.
Tags: dead, flashing, hard-drive, led, power, Technology, whatithink
Brian Tierney wrote an article pertaining to this. It effectively sais what you could but should not do. Could in that you may try if the data is absolutely not essential and you are not prepared to pay anything for retrieval. Shouldn’t in that the point of the article is to demonstrate the danger and futility of D.I.Y. hard drive repair.
The article is at http://www.backupanytime.com/bottom%20links/Data_Retrieval.htm
In essence, modern drives are cheap, fast spinning, fragile and like the rest of us have a definite but unknown date with death. Dont trust them. If budget and zero value data require you to trust them then the compromise (and this is a serious compromise) is to use several of them.
By the way, I hear you and know your pain. Most avid computer users have lost some data at some point in time. The issue has become more and more common with the quantity of data being stored on local drives increasing and the quality of the drives moving the same direction as price.
John
Hard drives are cheap, I just bought a 500GB Network accessible drive for €200. Along with my two desktop machines, another 320GB drive, I know have over 1TB of hard-drive space available. My most important data now lives on 4 different drives, so sparing a major disaster, there is no way that I’m going to go through all of that again!
I have done the exact same thing! Power supply for a laptop was pretty much identical but had a higher output.
Have you had any luck getting the data off it?
I was thinking of dismantling it and using it as an internal drive but after your comment I’m not so sure.
I only recently got around to getting the data off the drive. I bought an IDE enclosure, popped the drive in, and it worked perfectly. Luckily the drives internal power-board blew before the drive could be damaged.
I don’t know why it caused so much trouble when I put it in as a slave drive, but the only thing I can think of is that it could have been a problem with the jumper settings – there was no markings on the drive to suggest what jumpers need to be crossed to put the drive in slave mode.
The enclosure cost me about €30 from Dabs. Took about 2 minutes to assemble, and worked like a charm.
Since this happened I’ve bought a proper tool set which has a “star-head” which is what I needed for this drive. If I’d been a bit more patient, I could have saved myself a whole lot of hassle. Hindsight and all of that!
My advice would be to open the case, pull out the drive, and check if it gives any info on the required jumper settings. If it does, pop it in as an internal drive. If not, see if you can get a model number and check the manufacturers website for the required jumper settings.
Cheers,
Paul.
Brilliant! That’s great news, you wouldn’t by any chance know what size Torx (star-head) screwdriver is required?
Will need to order one unless I find one in a shop somewhere.
Sorry, I haven’t a clue. I dumped the old case before I got the tool-kit, so I have no way to check.
Judging by the stamps on the heads I have, it was either T-20 or T-25, but that’s just a guess.
Sorry about that,
Paul.
Hi There,
Thanks for the reply, went to a tool shop today and they went through a set, but I have a feeling they missed out size T-27, as 25 was too small and t-30 was too big.
I’ve ordered a stanley-knife style torx set that has t-15 up to t-40, but includes t-27, hopefully all will go well and I’ll have the luck you did.
I’ve now realised that having an external drive is not enough. This is the third time I’ve had a big data loss, I really haven’t learnt.
I’m going to buy two external hard drives and back up really important stuff to DVD as well, just for piece of mind.
But the power cables are so similar, would have never thought that could cause a problem, you’d think the manufacturers would build in a feature that stops the drive dying when the wrong cable is inserted.
Anyway, I’ll have to wait until next week for the set to arrive, will post on what happens.
Thanks again for your help!
It gives me some hope that I might get some stuff back that I need, if not all of it
It’s a hard lesson to learn, especially when it’s personal data that is lost. I’m like you, I’ve lost a lot of stuff over the years, things that I should really have backed up to more than one disk.
Now when I buy anything with a power adapter, the first thing I do is get a small piece of paper, write down what the adaptor is for, and tape it the wire just above the adaptor plug. That way, when I pick up the adaptor to plug it in to the device, I can see straight away if it’s the right one or not.
I also bought a network drive that connects into my wireless router. Using that, I can back up my data over the network, without having to worry which adaptor I need as it stays plugged in all the time. The data is also available to the other machines on the network, so if anything goes badly wrong, I can still access my data.
The drive is 500GB, which is more than enough for all my data and cost me about €200. The prices are coming down all the time, and you can now get 1TB drives for less than €300.
Let me know how you get on, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you!
Best of luck,
Paul.
Hi there,
The Tamper-proof torx kit arrived today, sadly not the right one. The drive has 5 point screws, not standard 6 point torx screws. Anyway I got a friend to get the case open using a filed down screwdriver.
Problem is, I tried putting it into the PC as an internal drive and found the same problem as you, the PC won’t power on when attached to the drive.
I do have an enclosure, but won’t be able to get to that for a few weeks. Seems so strange. I did look at the jumper settings as well and have changed them accordingly, but no luck.
Which enclosure did you buy? Just incase when I use my one back home it doesn’t work either.
Thanks.
Just wondering, did you just put the hard drive in a new case, and that’s all?
Really tempted to order one, or wait two weeks till I go back to my other home where I have one spare.
You didn’t swap the logic board or anything?
I bought a generic Dabs enclosure. The Dabs quixklinx is 3V5TWS. I just checked their website and this particular part is out of stock. It worked fine for me.
I didn’t swap the logic board, but I have copied the data onto another drive, just in case it does fail again at some point in the future.
Hi fellers,
Just reading this article and i am now trying to get hard drive going.(motor not spinning and not stuck because i took cove off and spun ) Then found out you should not do this. It is a maxtor 320gb external drive and the power light is flashing all the time.I also took it and put it in my pc to see if it was a power problem and that did not start up as you also describe. when i unplugged the hard drive it then started so i figured some kind of safty trip. I am now trying to source a logic board as all i want is just to collect data and then back up on more than1 drive. you explained about an enclosure but i have not a clue what this is. CAN YOU GIVE ME SOME ADVICE ON HOW TO GET HARD DRIVE WORKING.
Thanks Ian
An enclosure is basically a box that allows you to connect your drive externally to your computer.
You can find out more about enclosures here:
http://www.dabs.ie/ProductList.aspx?SearchTerms=ide enclosure&SearchMode=All&SearchKey=All&PageMode=3&NavigationKey=0&SearchType=1
Regarding the logic board, you’d need to buy the exact same drive as you are trying to repair, take the board off of that and then put it on the drive that holds the data that you need to retrieve. This is not a cheap option and it is not guaranteed to work.
As you have physically opened the drive, there is a very good chance that you may have damaged the drive beyond repair. In this case, if the data is valuable to you, your only option may be a data recovery specialist.
Paul.