Old IDE drive broken.

koooowweeee · 15 Jul 2017 at 21:20

Hi

I've just dug out a old drive with loads of baby pictures of my son that I never got around to backing up else where and it seems to be broken :-(

I can only find 1 IDE cable but I've tried the drive on 2 PC's and it doesn't detect in bios.

So what are my options? Will the drive still spin up with just a power cable? Can it be fix and what are the costs for this sort of service?

Thanks for any advice

PiKe · 15 Jul 2017 at 22:45

Drive should spin up with just the power cable.

koooowweeee · 16 Jul 2017 at 07:16

Thought so. Looks like it's died then. :-(

KIA · 16 Jul 2017 at 19:54

https://www.krollontrack.co.uk/services/data-recovery/

HoneyBadger · 17 Jul 2017 at 19:37

The needle maybe stuck in position. Try giving it a shake and then power it on. Place your hand on it and if working, you should feel it spin up.

koooowweeee · 18 Jul 2017 at 10:27

Just phoned a local data recovery form and they are saying it's more than likely a broken PCB. They are saying to recover the data it would be £350+vat. If I want them to just have a look at it and see if it's possible to fix it's £20+vat.

Would buying the same drive then swapping the PCB work? Seems a simple job but I'm not sure if there's any info for the drive that's needed on any of the chips?

postmanfw · 18 Jul 2017 at 11:37

If you can find an identical drive then yes the pcb can be swapped and it will work...done it myself once....hope you can find one.

koooowweeee · 18 Jul 2017 at 15:28

I've found a few on eBay. How identical does it need to be? Just the same model or is there more to it than that? Bios on the PCB maybe?

d_brennen · 18 Jul 2017 at 15:38

Ideally same model, PCB revision and firmware version, YMMV

I've done it a few times on some seagate drives that were dropping like flies many moons ago

koooowweeee · 18 Jul 2017 at 19:09

Not sure on the exact detail of the drive bit it's a 160gb Hitachi. They go for £20-30 on the bay for some reason.

If it works I'll be well happy. If it doesn't the wife is saying that the pictures are priceless. So I'll have to pay up :-(