muchacho
you are cool
do u have msn????
luka
On 27 Apr 2005 18:40:03 -0500, kidhacker@nym.alias.net (:KidHacker
NP-b54) wrote:
>On 27 Apr 2005 01:18:19 GMT, Muchacho del Tocino <muchacho@tocino.mxx>
>wrote:
>
>:>My two-year-old external hard drive has died. Almost everything I've
>:>downloaded from the groups over the past two years was on that drive.
>:>Some of my faves were on that drive. (Oh, boo-hoo!) Is there any discreet
>:>way to recover the data from a non-functioning drive, or should I just
>:>get out the hammer and start whacking it to pieces?
>[snippered]
>
>Yo MdT --
>
>Don't whack. At least not yet. There's some good advice here already,
>and all might *not* be lost.
>
>It's already been said that an external drive is simply a standard
>"internal" IDE drive that's mounted in a case with its own power
>supply and a USB or Firewire interface. The actual drive inside that
>case might be perfectly fine. If so, rescuing it might require a few
>tools and a little knowledge of computer guts, but it can be done.
>
>My first approach would be to power it up and listen to it, *very*
>closely. You should hear a faint whir as the platters spin up to
>speed, and a click or two as the head servos reset themselves to zero.
>
>If you (a) *do* hear such sounds, and not a squeeking or scratching
>noise (like a bad bearing), then the drive is most likely mechanically
>intact. If you (b) hear nothing at all, don't give up yet. If you hear
>(c) some sort of nasty noise from inside, then you might have a
>serious prob...
>
>In the case of a or b, the next step is to remove the cover and pull
>the drive out of the external case. Then you'd open your main computer
>case, (or that of some spare compuker you have laying around), and
>hook the drive up to *just* a power cable. It doesn't matter if it's
>hanging out of the side, it should just be propped up so it doesn't
>move around when it's running.
>
>This is a point, btw, where I have *no* idea whether you've ever been
>inside a computer or not. If you have, then this is pretty basic. If
>you haven't, then the only diff is that it might seem scary. If you
>haven't, be assured that none of this is "rocket science." It just
>requires a little guidance, which is available.
>
>Going on... you power up, and you listen for that whir. If you hear
>it, the platters are spinning up. (If not, then we get into some of
>the "last chance" methods Softee described.
>
>If this one is a yes, then you power down, and you find an unused IDE
>connector (i.e., like the 80 conductor ribbon cable that's plugged
>into the back of your main internal drive), and you plug it into the
>"suspect" drive, and you power up again.
>
>I'll make the rest of this a synopsis, because it's all dependent on
>your level of knowledge of computer guts. I don't want to go on for 6
>pages telling you things that you already know, but on the other hand,
>I wouldn't want to skip over something "assuming" you know about it
>when you don't. Feedback from you will determine how we approach it.
>
>Simplifying, what we're doing here is determining whether or not the
>drive is mechanically and electrically functioning. If no, it may be
>Softee time, or even hammer time. If yes, then we let the computer's
>BIOS try to identify it. This might involve some confusion on the part
>of the computer, and moving a jumper on the suspect drive, as
>required. (If it's jumpered as a "Master," and you hook it up to the
>same cable as your existing Master drive, the computer will be
>extremely unhappy and refuse to see either of 'em, and it'll try to
>make you think you've really phucked it up. Ignore it and turn it off.
>Simply unplugging the suspect drive will make it happy again.)
>
>If BIOS identifies it, then you *might* be able to read everything on
>it once you've booted into Windoze. If so, then you've proved that the
>drive and its contents are intact. If not, there are still ways.
>
>For now, I'll just offer an example, from my own experience. A few
>years ago, I had a 30 gig drive "fail." At that time, it was my
>biggest drive, and it had about 25 gigs of *very* important stuff on
>it, including some killer vids I'd been too lazy to burn to CDs, even
>though I *know* better.
>
>As it turned out, the power supply in the computer was failing. The
>drive was physically fine. With a new power supply, the drive was
>still "dead." BIOS knew what it was, but even DOS said it didn't
>exist. The partition table had been destroyed during some rad voltage
>fluctuations from the power supply. There was *no* way to access
>anything on it. I could "only" repartition it and start over.
>
>HAH!! I spent the best part of a week working with a forensics
>recovery proggy called "Lost and Found" (which I'll gladly post if we
>get to this point), and I recovered every single byte of everything
>that was on the drive. (I even saw, and *could've* recovered, an
>amazing amount of stuff that'd been long-since deleted and supposedly
>wiped.) Then I repartitioned it, formatted it, and started using it
>again. And I'm *still* using it.
>
>There's hope, MdT, but it'll take feedback from you, and some
>troubleshooting, to determine what went wrong, how bad it is, and what
>approach, if any, can salvage it. And, with little known as of now,
>the range can cover anything from fairly simple to hammer time.
>
>I'll help in any way I can. Just lemme know.
>
>Take care, and see ya.
>
>KH NP-b54
>
> "Artificial Intelligence will never be
> a match for natural stupidity."
> (Stolen)
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