[TriLUG] Hard drive recovery

[James Brigman]

Owen - I've recovered drives with failed electronics before, same as
Mark Shuford describes. I was using Maxtor drives in the 6-9GB range,
and realized the electronics were identical, except that each board had
different "code names" on the solder mask: I think one was "leopard" and
the other was "tiger" or something like that. They were, at one time,
using this convention to distinguish releases of the electronics.

Anyway: I took the dead 6GB drive, put the board on from a 9GB drive and
was once again able to see the data. I copied the data off, wiped the
original data, then restored the broke electronic board to the failed
Maxtor drive.

*customer testimonal, not spam*
I exchanged the drive under Maxtor's "advance replacement" program. They
treated me so well that I've stuck with their products ever since (and
have had only that one failure in about 8 years of using their drives. 
*end of testimonial*

JKB

On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 20:32 -0400, Owen Berry wrote:
> This morning my wife's computer crashed, the hard drive started making
> clicking noises, and, when rebooted would get past the BIOS startup and
> then stop with a flashing cursor in the top left hand corner of the
> screen. The only good sign is that the BIOS detects the hard drive.
> 
> Seems pretty bad. My first thought was to try to recover whatever
> possible using Knoppix. Tried booting off the CD, but all I got was the
> flashing cursor. Went into the BIOS and double checked that the CD drive
> came before the hard drive in terms of startup devices - it was. To be
> sure, I changed all 3 options to be the CD drive. Still the same result.
> 
> I tried unplugging the hard drive and then booting off Knoppix, and
> everything worked fine. Any ideas what I could be missing here?
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -- Owen
> 
>