# OT NT Hard drive question



## East Broad Top (Dec 29, 2007)

Question for all you computer gurus...

My wife's computer (iMac) just crashed; a combination of the logic board and hard drive. I'm fairly confident the data's still secure on the hard drive, thinking it's just the PC board that controls it is what's shot. (I installed it in my G5 tower, to the distinct smell of over-warmed electronic components, and the board getting quite warm to the touch. Knowing nothing about hard drives except how to install them and format them, what are my best options for recovering the data? The local Mac repair shop (not the Apple store) can attempt a software-based recovery, but if it's the control board that's shot, will that be worth the effort? Attempts to spin the drive via a sled were likewise unsuccessful. Is swapping out the control board a viable troubleshooting option? (Like I have a spare lying about anyway...)

I was in the middle of doing a back-up when things really went south, so there's still a bunch of stuff on the drive that I'd like to get off. Fortunately, I got the 15,000 photos backed up. 


Later,

K


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## JPCaputo (Jul 26, 2009)

You may be out of luck. If you can find another hard drive, with the same make, model, firmware revision, you have a chance. I have done it in the past and it works, it's a fairly delicate operation involving removing both boards, not damaging the flex cables & removing them from the boards. then putting ht board back almost exactly where it has to sit. 

Check the apple software recovery, if it can pull from a semi-smoked drive. Data-recovery companies many times can recover the data from smoked drives. 

Remember where theres a will, theres a way. how much $ and time is another question, linked to how valuable the data to be recovered is.


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## thespottedcat (Jan 2, 2008)

One thing you can try, and it has worked for me in the past, is to freeze it. 
Put in a zip lock bag, and chuck it in the freezer over night. 

Plug it back in via a caddie or external USB, if it does come up, copy only what you need first. It won't last long. 

When you rebuild with the new hardware, and if you can install leopard, two words, time machine 
Stan


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

The motor in these things doesn't have very much torque and sometimes if the disk bearings or a read/write head are stuck, then freezing the drive will often shrink the metal parts enough to break them loose and let the motor start to spin the disks again.

Freezing can also change read/write heads into a different alignment and this can enable it to read data that is skewed from the circular pattern on the disks.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be that type of problem. You indicate it is some component on the drive itself has let all the magic smoke out. Which component is the question and "why". If it is just a component on some circuit board attached to the drive itself and some other component was not damaged when that happened, then replacing the circuit board is "easy"... given that you have the right sized screwdriver tip AND know how to detach and reattach the cabling AND a working circuit board to swap into the drive.

You may have to heat the screwdriver to heat the screw to make it easier to break it free of the hole it is in (some have thread locker on them and are very difficult to unscrew without breaking it unless you heat it).

Pulling the cable loose off the board can also be a bit of a problem. Most have very tiny ribbon cables that do not have "plugs" attached... some just have the insulation missing from the sides at the end and are stuffed into a very thin socket on the board. Some sockets have a sliding or pivoting latch that should be moved to release the cable and make it easier to slide the cable back in. If you don't grip the cable just right you can bend and kink the end such that you will never get it to go back into a socket.

Once the new circuit board is in you can try to power it up. If the "real" cause of the problem is not some component in the drive that caused some other component to let all the magic smoke out, then maybe it will work... if it was some other initial cause that has not been eliminated (like the motor or some cable is shorted) then the new board may also let the magic smoke out and you are back to square one (or maybe minus one, because you now have two bad circuit boards!).

If the problem is a bad motor, then the possibility of recovering the data is almost nil unless you have a class 10,000 "Clean Room" (or better) and some very, VERY accurate tooling ($$$) to align the disk platters to a new motor shaft such that they spin in the EXACT same concentric way they did when the data was written to the disk using the original motor.

There are companies that will take a defunct drive and recover the data. Prices range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars, depending on what was wrong and what it takes to get the disks to spin in such way that the magntic tracks can be "tracked" by the read heads to read the data. Even if you have paid them lots-a moola, they may not be able to recover the data.


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## afinegan (Jan 2, 2008)

I have successfully used the freezer trick a few times, put the drive in a plastic ziplock back and into the freezer overnight, then 
put the drive out, hook it up as a secondary drive to another machine, quickly boot up and get the data off it ASAP (if it works) 
In highschool, I worked in one of those hole in the wall computer repair/network places, its funny how many times this has successfully worked. 

Replacing the board of the hard drive with the exact same board has also worked, past that, if it goes to ontrack your spending some money, that's why you have to treat all hard drives like there going to go poof at any moment, always have your data in another place (like family pictures!). Those little usb external hard drives can be a SAVIOR!, back up to it (check your backups, never trust your backup software) and place the book(external hdd) on your shelf, unconnected to your computer (you need a copy that is "offline" just in case you get a nasty virus, you have a safe clean copy of everything). 

Periodically, reconnect the book and update your backup (and manually verify it by opening at least 1 file) 

You prob know all of this already :-D


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## Pete Thornton (Jan 2, 2008)

Those little usb external hard drives can be a SAVIOR!, back up to it (check your backups, never trust your backup software) and place the book(external hdd) on your shelf, unconnected to your computer 

I noticed the other day that the video files on my external 350GB drive weren't backed up, so I bought another external backup drive - this time a 1TB (1000GB) for a mere $110. I copied the whole of my backup drive to it and parked it on the shelf, offline, as Andrew suggests. 

Another thought for you Windows guys: an external drive can be read by your next/new computer, so it's the easy way to move all your stuff to a new machine.


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## TonyWalsham (Jan 2, 2008)

If a copy of, say, C: drive is made on an external hard drive, does that mean you simply copy all that stored infromation onto a new computer and it will work? Assuming of course you have the necessary programs on the new computer to run the stored data?


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## Robbie Hanson (Jan 4, 2008)

Kevin, 

I'm assuming(since you put it in the G5) that it's either a G5 or Intel iMac with a SATA hard drive? 

Did the drive make any noise(i.e. spinning up) when you installed it in your G5 tower? 

In other words, is it truly fried? It seems odd to me to have a logic board AND a hard drive fail at the same time, since they're entirely separate entities; it's like having a locomotive fail at the same time as a battery charger. Not likely. 

If it is truly not spinning, then freezing it is basically your only option short of professional data recovery(not worth it IMO). 

There's a few more options, but they all require Windows and I'm not sure if I'd be able to explain it in words anyway. 

I'll add more thoughts if I have any--good luck!


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## Pete Thornton (Jan 2, 2008)

_K - sorry for the side track, but you have demonstrated the need for backup!_ 

 If a copy of, say, C: drive is made on an external hard drive, does that mean you simply copy all that stored infromation onto a new computer and it will work? Assuming of course you have the necessary programs on the new computer to run the stored data? 
Tony, 

In a word - No. The problem with your question is that you can't really make a copy of your C: drive, as it contains all the operating system and programs, as well as your data. 

You can copy all your files and folders (e.g. My Documents) to another drive, and then copy them back onto another computer and they will work fine. As you note, you will have to install the necessary programs on the new computer. Sometimes (older) programs store files in obscure places, such as the program folder in C:\Program Files, but that is getting less common since XP arrived. 

What you can do is take your C: drive out of your computer and plug it in to an identical computer and it will work exactly as it did on your original hardware. It does require identical hardware though, as the disk contains configuration data unique to your machine. 

You can also buy an external case for a hard drive with a USB cable on it. Remove the C: drive from your old computer, plug it in to the case, plug the USB cable into your new computer, and there's your external drive with all your files, available to the new computer. [Copy them immediately!]


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## TonyWalsham (Jan 2, 2008)

Hello Pete. 
I still cannot get a hang of all the different terms used with computers. I guess "copy" was the wrong word to use. 

Is a copy different to a "mirror" using something like "DRIVE IMAGE" software? 

I have an ASUS lap top with XP Pro which is coming up to 2 years old. This has been reliable and at present I can't afford a new one. Fingers and toes now crossed. 
Am I wasting my time "copying" as in "mirroring" the C: drive to an external hard drive?


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By TonyWalsham on 31 Dec 2009 03:03 PM 
If a copy of, say, C: drive is made on an external hard drive, does that mean you simply copy all that stored infromation onto a new computer and it will work? Assuming of course you have the necessary programs on the new computer to run the stored data? 

In general, yes, you can copy the data files (.jpg, .doc, .txt, etc.) from drive to drive and they are useable as is... just like e-mailing a file to a friend.

Some data files might reference additional files and when they do you may need to be sure to copy all of the external files and put them in the correct directory structure that the references in the main file are naming.

Most modern software programs utilize a method to find the "external to the main datafile" stuff by just putting it either in the same directory as the main datafile or in a folder of a unique name (like the appended "_files" name) that is in the same directory as the main file. BUT, some older (or "non-conforming") software may expect to find various parts of datafiles in specific subdirectories. If so, you must duplicate that specific directory tree when you copy the data files from one disk to another.

Example: Some HTML files refer to external images and scripts, etc. that are in a folder/directory that is in the same folder as the main file that has the same name with "_FILES" appended to the name. I have on my system a file named, "Switch.HTM" and a directory named, "Switch_Files". In that directory are a bunch of image files (.JPG and .GIF) and a Java Script file (.JS) and a few other files. If I copy only the .HTM file and not the folder then I lose the images as well as some functionality in viewing the file (animations, or interactive driven content). If I rename the folder or put it in some other directory, then the references in the main file will all be wrong and I again lose the images, etc. just as if I had not copied them. As long as I move them as a pair and do not rename them all is okay.

In the past I have run into problems using an external drive when the program expected to find data in a particular drive letter (like "D:") and when I moved the external drive to a different computer it gets mounted with a different drive letter (like "E:") and the program then cannot find the data. Fixing this sillyness is often quite involved and sometimes not worth the effort.



You often cannot copy a Program from one computer to another. You usually have to "install" it on the next computer. A Program often requires additional files (software subroutine library files, help files, images displayed on its various windows, etc.) and directory structures and (in Windows) entries in the Windows Registry, so when the program is run, it can find all of its bits and pieces.

There are also many programs that do not require an "installation" and can be just copied anywhere you want. Some may require some library files that need to be copied too, but sometimes you can figure out what they are when you try to run the program... you will get an error message that names a library file it needs... so all you need to do is find that file on the old computer and copy it also to the new computer to the correct directory... (I have had to run a program 5 or 6 times to finally find all the missing library files, but it worked okay after I found them all! I even discovered a missing library about a year after I had copied everything because I had not attempted some operation in the program during that time. Oops!)


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By TonyWalsham on 31 Dec 2009 04:32 PM 
Hello Pete. 
I still cannot get a hang of all the different terms used with computers. I guess "copy" was the wrong word to use. 

Is a copy different to a "mirror" using something like "DRIVE IMAGE" software? 

I have an ASUS lap top with XP Pro which is coming up to 2 years old. This has been reliable and at present I can't afford a new one. Fingers and toes now crossed. 
Am I wasting my time "copying" as in "mirroring" the C: drive to an external hard drive? 

A "Mirror" in general requires that the data be returned to the same make and model of drive it is a mirror of. There are some programs that can alter the structure of the whole lot of ones and zeros to work on a different brand/model of drive, but the operating system on the "C:" drive may not like the new drive... or if the new drive is in a new computer then the new computer may have different other hardware (display, sound, other I/O devices, etc.) and as such it just won't work. But you might be able to extract the "user data" (.doc, .jpg, .txt, etc.) files.


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## Semper Vaporo (Jan 2, 2008)

Posted By Pete Thornton on 31 Dec 2009 04:11 PM 
_K - sorry for the side track, but you have demonstrated the need for backup!_ 

If a copy of, say, C: drive is made on an external hard drive, does that mean you simply copy all that stored infromation onto a new computer and it will work? Assuming of course you have the necessary programs on the new computer to run the stored data?
Tony, 

In a word - No. The problem with your question is that you can't really make a copy of your C: drive, as it contains all the operating system and programs, as well as your data. 

You can copy all your files and folders (e.g. My Documents) to another drive, and then copy them back onto another computer and they will work fine. As you note, you will have to install the necessary programs on the new computer. Sometimes (older) programs store files in obscure places, such as the program folder in C:\Program Files, but that is getting less common since XP arrived. 

What you can do is take your C: drive out of your computer and plug it in to an identical computer and it will work exactly as it did on your original hardware. It does require identical hardware though, as the disk contains configuration data unique to your machine. 

You can also buy an external case for a hard drive with a USB cable on it. Remove the C: drive from your old computer, plug it in to the case, plug the USB cable into your new computer, and there's your external drive with all your files, available to the new computer. [Copy them immediately!] 
Oops, I see Pete types faster than I do.

I think we said the same thing, just different woids. 

And you are quite properly confused as to the terminology involved... copy, mirror, files, data, they all have some similar meaning, but sometimes have a particular connotation that can confuse... a "mirror" is a "copy" but it is specific in its meaning to be a bit by bit and location by location image of the original, whereas a copy may be a bit by bit image, but it could be spread all over other places (not just a different directory, but different tracks and sectors on the drive (or multiple drives) as long as the operating system sees it as one entity to be manipulated. A "mirror" will also contain additional information to explain (to the program that will read it) as to where each bit/byte/word etc. goes when returned to the same make/model of drive.

Unfortunately, we sometimes fling words around without regard to precise meaning (and it is not always necessary to be precise) but when doing so, it can confuse those that do not use the terms everyday and have an indepth knowledge of what they mean in context. Same things happen in talking about "G-scale"!


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## TonyWalsham (Jan 2, 2008)

Um errrr!!! 
Thanks a bunch for taking the time to explain it. 
I guess I willl have to save my pennies and pay the money to those that can understand it. I surely don't. 

I still haven't grasped the concept of ports. I cannot get a hub to work no matter what I try. So I label each plug in bit of hardware as to which USB socket it goes into on the computer.


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## Dan Pierce (Jan 2, 2008)

There are drive copy programs that allow you to image one drive to another and this newly created drive will work just fine in the original system. I have done this with XP, win2k, and all previous window operating systems. 

I use the Norton GHOST program and it has never failed me to date.


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## Ltotis (Jan 3, 2008)

Ghost is excellent. There is also one or two other programs around that do the same thing. If you have a wintel/winamd machine you want to verify that the software you buy can also image the area oof your drive that has the operating system rebuild partition. I use Achronos (spelling might be incorrect) which worked on my Lenovo machine with Vista but did not peform the same on my XP machines. As for a motherboard taking down a hard drive or vice versa I have seen it happen but in many cases it is the power supply, AC fluctuation problems or a static zap. I agree that freezing the drive and or replacing the circuit board might help you retrieve data. 
LAO


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## Pete Thornton (Jan 2, 2008)

I still cannot get a hang of all the different terms used with computers. I guess "copy" was the wrong word to use. 

Is a copy different to a "mirror" using something like "DRIVE IMAGE" software? 
Tony, 

C.T. said it all, but here's some different woids again. 

A mirror is a 1:1 image, and the same is true on a computer. Mirrored disks are usually identical copies of data, so if one drive fails you can continue without stopping. (The drive controller usually decides which disk to read the data from and will write any data to both identically.) They aren't usually used for the base drive (C:\) as you can't handle programs the same way, as mentioned above. 

In a simple situation like yours, the files and folders are all organised by the directories and the O/S FAT section of the disk - in other words, it doesn't matter where they are put, the O/S will find them by looking in the directories. 

What this means is that data can be recovered (copied by you or accessed by a program,) from any disk that was written by a recent version of windows (or the Mac O/S I believe.) 

If you have a mirrored disk that's fine. A new computer will see it as a supplemental/external disk when you plug it in and will allow you to copy any files, or read them with the programs on the new computer. What you won't be able to do is use the programs that are on the mirrored disks. So they are just wastied space - but disk space is cheap so if mirroring works for you then stick with it. 

In fact, keeping a mirror disk is actually better in some cases, as you don't have to keep track of which files you copied to your backup disk. [Not a trivial problem ! Synchronising lots of files between two disks can be complicated. ]

My portable disk, a Maxstor Onetouch, came with a utility program that installed on my main computer and, when the disk is plugged in, it goes around and figures out which files are not on the backup, which files on the computer are newer than the ones on the backup, etc. I just let it do its thing. (It asks politely before starting each phase.)

My big external drive has a 'backup' utility that I don't like, as it stuffs all my files into strange formats and puts them in one 'recovery' file on the external. I let it do it once a week in case of a catastrophe, but I go around and copy the "\My Documents" folder(s) over to the external drive [just like a mirror!]


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## ShadsTrains (Dec 27, 2007)

I have a drive sitting in my office cabinet waiting to be sent off for similar problems. If you have data that you absolutely need to save, I wouldn't recommend trying to change any boards or anything else on your own. If the "freezer trick" doesn't work, and you can afford it, send it off to a recovery place. Be careful with which one you use. Some are highway robbers and charge huge fees because they know you're desperate. There are some companies that only charge a flat fee, but they won't do complicated restores. After that, you have to evaluate how much you want to spend. You will quickly approach $1000... My plan is to send it off to the flat fee place and see what they say. If they can't recover the data, then I'll call it a loss. I lost a bunch of mp3 files from my CD and vinyl collection. I spent hours and hours ripping them. My time to re-rip them is most certainly worth something, so if it will only cost $200 to $300 to recover the files, it's worth it. Any more than that. I'll just re-rip as I get the time.


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