Is there even a remote chance of a DIY repair of a failed hard drive? I have an external drive that fails to spin up and mount. (Software solutions are out of the question.) I have no interest in the drive itself, only the data.
This drive came in a case with an interface from Ultra ATA on the drive to both USB and Firewire in the case. I believe the power supply brick is OK (steady 12.00V during start-up) but I have no way to know about the interface card. I've ordered an IDE-to-SATA adapter to rule that out. I'll plug into the drive into SATA on a working desktop. Maybe I'll get lucky.
Assuming the worst, I looked into drive recovery and it looks like the going rate is $1K-1.5K. I hate to lose what I think is on that drive, but not that much!
So I'm wondering about options. I gather some people have had success with replacing the controller on the drive. This drive is probably 10 years old, so finding one could be a challenge. How pointless is it to crack open the case? Is there anything in there that might be fixed by a normal person? I don't have a clean room but I only need enough life to extract the data.
This drive came in a case with an interface from Ultra ATA on the drive to both USB and Firewire in the case. I believe the power supply brick is OK (steady 12.00V during start-up) but I have no way to know about the interface card. I've ordered an IDE-to-SATA adapter to rule that out. I'll plug into the drive into SATA on a working desktop. Maybe I'll get lucky.
Assuming the worst, I looked into drive recovery and it looks like the going rate is $1K-1.5K. I hate to lose what I think is on that drive, but not that much!
So I'm wondering about options. I gather some people have had success with replacing the controller on the drive. This drive is probably 10 years old, so finding one could be a challenge. How pointless is it to crack open the case? Is there anything in there that might be fixed by a normal person? I don't have a clean room but I only need enough life to extract the data.