hard disk failure

gdea73

The hard disk in my Dell Dimension 8300 died. I should've known, because the 40G disk itself I obtained from a dumpster Pentium II.
I had some stuff on there, not sure what, but I'd like to get it off myself rather than pay for a data recovery company to do so.

The drive's SMART attributes were fine up until it died, except the soft error rate, which would usually be an integer between 1 and 10. The drive passed any extended SMART tests I ran with smartctl, though I hadn't tested it in a while.

It made no noises even after failing. I haven't gotten any motherboard to boot with it attached; some freeze during POST, and others detect it and show "hard disk error."

Given these symptoms, would it be worth buying a matching PCB on eBay and replacing it? Because it seems like the platter/head/etc. were fine, and it may be a non-mechanical issue.

And of course, it was a Maxtor. Hadn't backed it up for about 6 months.

Since then, I got a designated backup drive and setup cron jobs on my PCs to back up to it, and it's been a good solution so far.

Kirk

Have you tried the freezer trick yet?

gdea73

As a matter of fact I have. I put it in a bag of rice in the freezer to prevent moisture from entering the circuitry (and I left it in the bag while it thawed). Unfortunately, this did not help.

Mainly I'm wondering whether a PCB replacement seems like a viable option.

gdea73

eh sorry to bump this but basically the drive seems to spin up correctly, and the BIOS knows it's there, but will either hang or pause and say "hard disk 0 error" depending on the motherboard... so before I drop $40 on a PCB replacement, does this sound vaguely like a PCB problem?

(no weird noises/clicking, and the hard disk randomly died while I was using the PC, it blue screened and hard reset.)

Kirk

gdea73 wrote:

eh sorry to bump this but basically the drive seems to spin up correctly, and the BIOS knows it's there, but will either hang or pause and say "hard disk 0 error" depending on the motherboard... so before I drop $40 on a PCB replacement, does this sound vaguely like a PCB problem?

Anything is possible. I've never replaced a PCB as part of a data recovery operation, usually when I dispose of drives it's because of the click of death, or the performance gets really bad, or the drive fails to DBAN. I can't say that I've ever personally had a drive fail where it hasn't been making an obvious noise.

I would certainly not drop $40 on a PCB replacement to see if that *might* fix the issue. I'd look for the PCB on eBay, or eBay a drive of the same model. You could probably get something much cheaper.

BlueSun

Yeah, I would try to find the same exact drive cheap somewhere else. Verify the new drive works before attempting to swap the PCB.