Fried SATA drive

[Lazarus]

Guys,

just as I was switching over from IDE to a new SATA drive, I had a funny smell eminate from the PC and now the system does not recognise the SATA drive connected to the system.

any way that I can recover data from the disk?

 

[inactionman]

Short of spending lots of money, no, unless you are really good with a soldering iron! Professional firms charge somewhere in the region of £K's per gig these days, they'll either replace the control board on the drive (this is relatively cheap, say £500-1000, which you could possibly do if you are *really* good), or read the data directly off the platters with a laser (needs a clean room and lots of expensive equipment, the £K's per gig figure).

Basically the lesson is to always back up your data!

 

[Kryten]

Check your bios settings : on a fair few motherboards there is a particular setting that prevents the almost wilful frying of SATA drives - trouble is I can't remember what motherboards and what option it was. My memory isn't what it once was

Unlikely you will be able to recover anything short of taking your drive to a recovery agent for lots of £

 

[smurkin]

Check your bios settings : on a fair few motherboards there is a particular setting that prevents the almost wilful frying of SATA drives - trouble is I can't remember what motherboards and what option it was. My memory isn't what it once was

Addled with silicon rickets

 

[Lazarus]

what if I take the controller from one SATA drive and install it in the fried one - or is this too simple ?

 

[inactionman]

That was my suggestion. However you'll need an identical drive, and it's very fiddly. Also it may not have just been the controller that got fried, it may have got the motor/heads.

 

[smurkin]

actually, it might not be that difficult..some drives just have little silver ribbon connnectors connecting their pcb watchamagigs- a few screws - no soldering required. Anyway, I'd go into diagnostic mode first and find out what was smelling bad - theres a good chance you might be able to spot some charring. Another question I might ask - does the hard drive make any noise - so ok, its not recognised - but it might not actually be the drive thats burnt out. And first, try the drive in antoher pc...its gotta be worth a go.

*edit*...I have to say, I dont really understand what you were doing - were you actually moving data from the IDE to the SATA? Are the files still on the IDE...could you recover them from there?

Finally, older versions of XP can be an utter twat with SATA drives and not recognise them. Just a thought.

 

[Lazarus]

drive seems to make NO noise when powered up with either standard or ~SATA power cables.

I was moving data from IDE to SATA, changing SATA to drive C:\, then formatting the old IDE to use it as a backup drive.

 

[smurkin]

so the new drive burnt while you were formatting the old drive...ouch - that IS bad karma

 

[Lazarus]

well,

its been a while, but I managed to recover all of my data from the drive

as inactionman suggested, I took the controller board from my "good" HDD and stuck it on the knackered one (no soldering - it was contact points on the bootom of the board)

The main problem I had was finding someone else I knew with a SATA HDD - tried it on mine, but the drive was not bootable)

Finally found someone and copied allthe stuff off to some CD's

Now, I might try and contact someone from work for a new controller board - and get the other HDD actually working.