[Ric]

Not a good day

Just set up a new computer. Had a nice SATA hard drive that I have been using as a backup drive. Decided to upgrade MOBO and CPU and might as well make this the new OS drive (seagate 7200.9 300 GB). Part of this process was also adding a new 1Terabyte drive to create backups. Well - computer ran fine for a couple of days so getting ready to figure out this backup process using RAID. (yes, currently had a partitioned section of this new SATA drive with music and pictures). Haven;t backed up since Jan - not good - I know. Anyway, computer stopped recognizing the SATA drive. Checked all connections - rebooted - hmmm, why is there smoke coming from the SATA power connector - guess I should shut this sucker down!

Pulled drive, and stuck it in old computer I have sitting around as of course new computer won't power up with drive. Hoping it was a connection and I could still grab data - wow, more smoke - cool! Have the ANTEC external eSATA case around - yes, its worth $40 bucks to possibly kill the ANTEC to try and get data. Slide in drive and connect cables but nada - ANTEC won't start with drive.


SO - any options at all right now? This thing has some important stuff on it but I can't afford $1000 data recovery (even if that would work)

 

[funhouse69]

If you seriously saw smoke coming from the drive itself then I would say that your chances of getting that drive to spin up again are pretty slim.

As for options there really aren't many. If the electronics of the drive are bad then the only recourse is to have the actual internal discs removed and put them in to a working chassis. This sounds somewhat easy but needs to be done in a clean room environment.

The only thing I can suggest is to contact the drive manufacturer and see what they can tell you. They might try to repair it in someway but I'm sure it won't be free.

 

[LarryFlowers]

There is a solution... but you won't like it.. It will involve a company with a "clean room" facility who would disassemble your drive and remove the individual platters to recover the data to dvd's...

Clean room, clean room techs, data recovery= very very expensive, they charge by the gigabyte... useful for company critical data but probably not for anything else.