Comment on Holiday Upgrade Disasters
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 12 hours agoI’ve had some luck with portable drives by removing the drive from enclosure and attaching it directly to sata-bus instead of USB. Also, as a general rule for anyone who might stumble on this, whenever attempting recovery at first create an image (I use ddrescue) and work with that. That way you’ll minimize risk of causing even more damage.
A while ago we “fixed” couple of hard drives with my brother. All of them had a single faulty diode, apparently it was a known failure point on those drives and brother found instructions online how to bypass that diode. Obviously that doesn’t really fix the drives, but a small piece of wire and some soldering was enough to get drives spinning again long enough that he could copy data over to new drives.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
I did try removing it from the enclosure in hopes to hook it to a USB3.0 to IDE/SATA which also includes legacy stuff. However this drive (HD Passport) has the micro-b soldered onto the drive board. I’ve tried several different micro-b to whatever connections, but no joy. The drive won’t initialize and reports a fatal hardware error when I try. When initially plugged in, you can physically feel the platter spin momentarily, and the power light comes on. But the platter will stop spinning and the power light will start blinking on and off. This drive has been beat up, dropped, etc, in a camera gear bag. I’m actually surprised it hasn’t failed before now.
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
If it tries to start but doesn’t do anything it’s pretty much a lost cause then as the drive gets power but fails to initialize. In theory a simple broken solder joint somewhere might cause that and that might be fixable, but that requires at least somewhat decent soldering station and some experience. Or maybe you could get a donor board and swap out memory chips from the old one, but that’s even more tricky. Hopefully it’s not too expensive lesson.