[Discuss] Hard Drive Death

[John Blomfield]

On returning after a week away visiting for Christmas, I receive an 
unpleasant New Year surprise of a dead HD. That is the BIOS does not 
recognize the drive, nor does a live CD. In the rush to leave I had 
neglected my usual monthly backup so I have lost about 6 weeks of data, 
except for some critical stuff that I backup more regularly. However, I 
would like to recover the lost stuff if possible. The drive a WD 3.5" 
250 GB appears not to be damaged physically in anyway and the control 
board is not showing signs of burning etc. The advice on the Internet 
runs from "easy to fix" to "don't even attempt it", when it comes to 
changing the control board, which is the most likely problem. I have two 
other HD's that are identical to the dead one so in theory I could 
change a control board to attempt to recover some data. Some "advice" 
states its just a question of swapping boards and others came you also 
must "transfer the firmwear from the damaged board to the new board", 
since the data structure is unique. However, I don't want to do the 
latter as I might end up with two dead HDs!

The lost data is not life and death stuff as I have the most critical 
stuff backed up - just means a bit of time recreating the data. My 
dilemma is will it take more time to recover the data from the dead HD 
than to recreate it?

Has anyone ever attempted this or other solutions for recovering data.

I guess this is the first time this has happened to me in the last 30 
years of PC computing - sagely advice on using RAID etc already noted 
and acknowledged. I shall no doubt review my future backup strategy to 
make sure my failing memory does not let me down again.

-- 
John Blomfield
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Old John B's Linux Notes http://www.oldjohnbslinux.wordpress.com