Hard Drive Deterioration
August 31st, 2006I may be headed for an involuntary hiatus from posting because my hard drive is beginning to act like it has Alzheimer’s and files are beginning to disappear. Each time I start my computer is worse than the last. Pretty soon I won’t even be able to boot the thing up. I should have started to migrate my photos and songs as soon as I saw it happening, but alas it looks like I might lose everything. C’est la vie—in the meantime I’m at least I’m enjoying the week visiting my sister and her family. Here are some photos of my cute nephews.
September 1st, 2006 at 11:50 pm
jeff
if you can power down your puter:
disconnect old drive (set jumpers to slave)
install new drive (set jumpers to master)
then load operating system
power down again
connect your old drive (should be slave)
boot up & you should see you old drive as new device
open new device
select all files
copy to new drive (verify files are copied)
power down puter, disconnect old drive & destoy (hammertime) (security)
power & boot pull all the files you need from you newly created backup.
finally delete backup, once you have all files you need
it may take a few boots or attempts to see all of you data on your old drive, just copy as the opportunity permits.
sounds like you drives controller is loosing it’s mind
December 26th, 2006 at 9:17 am
Hi. I have two 40GB Maxtor 34098H4 hard drives, one of which died completely three months ago. The BIOs will not recognize it and it will not spin when my computer is powered up. The dead drive does not make any noise. After doing some research, I found two seemingly possible methods of getting a dead drive to spin which each have supporters and detractors. The two methods are possible alternatives (To those who cannot afford it) to paying thousands of dollars to a professional firm with a sealed clean room to recover data. The first method involves finding the same model hard drive as the dead one with the exact PCB (Printed Circuit Board) and then swapping the PCB from the good drive into the dead one to make it spin. The second method involves putting the dead drive into a Ziplock storage bag and putting it into the freezer overnight and then taking the drive out and pray that the hard drive will spin. I wanted to try the first method but after examining my good hard drive, which is of the same size and model as the dead one, I found that the PCBs are slightly different. So, the first method will not work for me (I don’t have the time and resources to try to find an exact PCB for the dead drive). I was wondering, would the second method work? Many people have claimed that the second method works and others have claimed that it would end up damaging the drive heads or platters even further. In your experience, have you tried the second method and what is the success rate for making the hard drive spin again so that data can be recovered? I just want to recover some old pictures and music from my dead drive. Any assistance you can offer is greatly appreciated. Thanks!