My Attempt at Hard Drive Data Recovery

There are a few ways to know when a hard drive is failing:

• Loud Clicking Noises
• Bad Sectors
• S.M.A.R.T. Status Failure (not necessarily accurate…)

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any prior warning. My drive refused to mount late last year with me thinking a cable was loose. It was worse. I smelled burning coming from the hard drive. On closer inspection, this is what I saw:

The logic board had fried and I was able to clearly see a burned area.

This is a 250GB Seagate Hard Drive (PDF specs).

Fortunately, I had a backup of about 90% of the files on the drive. There was some work that I had not yet backed up as it hadn’t reached that cycle yet.

I knew my normal methods of getting data off a drive wouldn’t work:

• Taking the drive and shoving it into an enclosure
• Putting it into a spare machine and running SpinRite for days

This was because the drive is not detected in the BIOS during a boot-up. I decided to leave it alone as I thought it was hopeless.

A few months later, I saw a website about drive recovery, I suspected that I could pull the logic board of the drive and not void my warranty.

I managed to find another drive that had the same model number in another computer. I quickly took apart the drive and swapped the logic boards and then put it into my enclosure. It Mounted! I transferred everything I hadn’t backed.

Since it was under warranty, I decided I wanted to RMA it back to Seagate. I formatted the drive using a 7-Pass format to reduce as much possible data recovery as possible. Then, I swapped the defective logic board back in and sent it to Seagate.

A few days later, my new drive arrived! It was a refurbished drive of the same model. Yay!

What I learned:
- Hourly Backups (to another drive)
- Daily Backups to Internet (Apple iDisk)
- Buy Drives in Pairs (spare logic board and backup usage)

What have you had to do for data recovery? I would love to know. Please comment =)