Raising the dead Can a regular person repair a damaged hard drive Edit This story was written to detail the options a user has when a hard drive with important data dies unexpectedly. Many of you have left comments advocating the freezer trick, stating that used as a Hail Mary, youve had good results. I do not dispute that the freezer trick canwork. If you have a hard drive you dont really care about, and youre curious to see if you can get the data, by all means, freeze it. If you do need your data back to the point that youre considering paying someone to retrieve it, do not freeze the drive, even as a Hail Mary. You may very well make the problem worse and end up costing yourself money. On June 2. 2, 2. 01. Bootable Ghost Iso Image'>Bootable Ghost Iso Image. Samsung HD1. 03. SI, quietly passed away. There was no warning no grinding, no clicks, clacks, or sudden bang. One moment, I was working on a story, the next, I wasnt. Internet Explorer Blocked This Website From Installing An Activex Control more. It quickly became clear that something more serious than a simple system lock had happened. Post reboot, the HDD would spin up smoothly, beep 1. The drive was never recognized in BIOS, which nixed any chance of using disk recovery software to extract data. This is a story of my efforts to repair the drive myself, my research into the question of whether or not users can repair modern hard drives, and the results of my efforts. If your drive is still detected in BIOS, you may be able to use software tools to retrieve your data. Here, were going to focus exclusively on hardware related failures, and what your options are. Having a hard drive die without warning will ruin anyones day. It certainly ruined mine but heres what I. Some multiplayer games that implement the PunkBuster anti cheat system get cheaters off the server using hardware bans. It used to ban the hard disk serial number but. SEAGATE 1TB Internal Serial ATA Hard Drive for Desktops Serial ATA interface perpendicular recording, Seagate OptiCache and Seagate AcuTrac technologies data. Micro Center Web Store You are currently browsing the products available on our web store. If you would like to choose a store location, please do so below. Part of the reason for writing this story is that data recovery is difficult to accurately research unless youre fairly versed in it to start with. There are dozens of data recovery firms, all promising clean rooms, the latest tools, and highly trained professional staff. Many firms refuse to publish their prices online, which makes comparisons difficult, and its apparently common for small companies to farm tough jobs out to larger ones. This one, for example, is pretty much toast. Step 1 Broadly identify the type of problem. There are two broad categories of problems that can nuke a drive PCB issues and internal component failures. If the problem is inside the drive, skip down to Step 3. If the problem is on the PCB, there is a glimmer of hope. Original image courtesy of mdproductions. The best kind of PCB problem to have is a blown Transient Voltage Supressor TVS diode, as shown above. According to Seagates FAQ, a TVS diode protects a sensitive circuit by diverting damaging overvoltages and spikes away from the load. When a spike occurs, the diode blows. Because the diode is no longer functional, the drive wont power up. Snip the diode off, and the drive will function normally, albeit in an unprotected fashion. Copy your data over to a functional unit, toss the old one, and count yourself lucky. My hard drive unfortunately didnt die this way. There was no visible damage to the PCB but when I removed the board and flipped it over I found a burned out contact point. Step 2 Understand your options. From here, youve got two choices. You can opt for a replacement PCB, or you can buy an entire donor drive. Its important to secure as close a match as possible between the original HDD and the donor driveboard. Hard-Disk-Manager-Professional.jpg' alt='Get Physical Hard Drive Serial Number' title='Get Physical Hard Drive Serial Number' />In my case, that meant finding an HD1. SI PCB that matched my drives makemodel number, PCB number, board revision, and drive family Trinity, in this case. The drive controller model number and PCB codes are outlined in red. Understand this Simply replacing the PCB almost certainly wont fix a dead drive. If it does, youve gotten lucky. Each drive ROM contains parameters and data unique to that particular device if the parameters for your dead drive are different from those contained on the donor PCB, it wont function. In my case, I opted for just a PCB. Free Download HDD Low Level Format Tool 4. Utility for lowlevel hard disk drive formatting, with support for SATA, IDE or SCSI hard disks, as w. Tabtight professional, free when you need it, VPN service. In retrospect, a full drive might have been the better option, but the purchase only set me back 2. China. Swapping out the PCB eliminated the 1. Beep less, my drive sat mute spinning, but unrecognized in BIOS. Your options at this point depend on what sort of HDD you have. Some hard drives have an externally mounted ROMNVRAM chip that can be removed and soldered on to a new PCB. Other drives, like mine, incorporate the ROM into the controller. The only way to find out is to go digging for information online, and youve got to apply a strong sort filter to estimate the value of what youll find. A number of dubious websites advertise a PC3. PCI card, for example, but this is almost always a Chinese clone of the original product, and is far too old to handle modern drives in any case. The real PC3. 00. UDMA test kit runs over 4. After my simple PCB swap didnt work, I decided to try to repair the burned contacts on the original board. Here, your options are to either buy a conductive ink pen or to use something a bit more humble. I took the humble option, trotted over to an auto parts store, and picked up a rear window defroster repair kit. Fm Genie Scout G. I taped off the damaged contact, applied the conductive ink, gave it 1. My repaired PCB. The burned contact is at the far lower right of the group. And nothing had changed. The drive still spun up, emitted twelve beeps, and spun back down. That was my second major disappointment and it leads directly to the next stepNext page Resist the urge to do something stupid.