Dead drives
Two of my kids have three hard drives they would like brought back from the dead.
For my daughter, her dead drive apparently has every file she has ever collected, including quite a bit of school work, digital pictures and some music. My son’s two hard drives have a large number of music files ripped from old records or CD’s he no longer has. Note to self: back-up today.
The first two drives I have looked at do make sounds, but I can’t see them from a Ubuntu or Mac OS machine, using a USB to IDE/Sata connector. These were cases of drives working one moment, and not working at all the next moment. In a Mac, the Disk Utility does not see the drives. In Ubuntu, Gparted does not recognize the drives either.
Next test for one, a 2.5 inch SATA drive, was the famous deep freeze trick, to see if that works. After a couple of hours in the deep freeze, the 2.5 inch SATA drive still DID NOT work.
I was more luck with the third drive, which was a 500 gb Western Digitial My Book USB external drive in a black plastic case. Apparently the USB interface was broken and shorting out. When I removed the drive and tested it on another USB connection, it worked fine, and my son was very grateful to get back nearly 500 gigs of data.
Tags: hard drive failures