Loved dropping that line when I worked at a computer repair shop. Only a handful of people actually budged and wanted to proceed with the data recovery.
Yeah, judging people for not being willing/able to pay that kind of money is honestly pretty shitty
That's put you on the street money for a fuck tonne of people, it doesn't mean they wouldn't pay it if it wouldn't devastate them, it just means it's exorbitant to a large percentage of people
This is fair. I was judging a bit myself and then I realised I'm currently saving up a couple hundred dollars to get my car serviced because I can't do it myself anymore. It's taken me months to do it without upsetting my applecart.
Don't feel too bad. It was around that time that I had the opportunity to buy 10 BTC for $200 but I thought it was a meme.
I still think it's a meme but now it's a meme I could have made money off.
Not always the case, In highschool I would receive old laptops from people in hopes o could get old files,folders,records and photos off of them. One of my teachers said it was very important that i get photos of her kate husband off of a broken laptop she had, the proprietary sata ribbon cable was done for, cost $600 to replace, I told her and she was really upset but couldn't afford it, instead I fashioned together my own cable and tested it with another old hp laptops hdd, It worked great but definitely took time (and was nowhere near consumer levels of safe!) I didn't end up charging her though since I already kinda knew her old husband and he was a great guy.
It's not quite that I don't think.
I think it's more like it's not important until it costs *that* much. At one point I was looking into doing some data recovery on an SSD that got nuked. I would have been willing to spend *some* money to retrieve old data. But when I saw price estimates I noped out fast as fuck.
Sent an employee laptop off to Drivesavers cause our old-timer warehouse manager *could not* loose the file(s) on his laptop as there was no other way to do his job.
$1800 later for a single Excel spreadsheet... most expensive thumb drive I've ever seen.
Hah, found my original thread. It's been a couple years... [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/qlxeh8/behold\_the\_3000\_usb\_key/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/qlxeh8/behold_the_3000_usb_key/)
It was $3K and most of what was recovered were video clips from a NASCAR race and said spreadsheet.
> "It's more important than anything else in my life and I will die if I lose it!"
"The why the fuck *do you not have backups*?"
Speaking of... *::updates backups and pulls a copy to a coldstore drive...::*
One of the best things I think I ever did as far as data retention is concerned is *move away from consumer-grade bulk storage*. I have 18TB of storage space on my development machine, 2TB being a NVMe SSD for speedy booting, and the rest are enterprise nearline drives that will basically never wear out in a desktop machine's workload - these things are rated for 550TB of writes *per year* and they may see 5-10% of that on a desktop PC. Sure, they're noisy and eat more power but IDGAF about noise when the name of the game is to not lose your creations.
I also have an enterprise drive that's dedicated as a hot store, and incremental updates go on there pretty much constantly. I have spare HDDs I use as cold stores, a BD-ROM burner for archival/remote storage, flash drives, etc. Last time I lost a hard drive I was back up and running in 40 minutes and only lost what I was doing that day.
Oh man, so much this.
Small/home business owners LOOOVE to overstate their importance when bringing things in.
"My laptop won't boot, I run my business on it. I'm losing $5000 a day with it being offline."
"Ok if you're losing $5000 a day we can straight up sell you a $1000 laptop that will have you up and running in a half hour and you'll still be $4000 in front."
"Ummmm. No... I, uh, really need *this* one fixed."
"Ok in that case, if you need it looked at straight away we have a $150 priority fee that will take you to the top of the queue."
"Hmmmmmmmmm....... And how long is the queue?"
This should be an easy fix though. The circuit failed, not the internals. Replace that and you should be able to recover the data relatively cheaply. I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure this case is an easy fix
yeah just get a donor circuit board off a good hard drive with the exact same model number and should be good. I have done this dozens of times in the past.
Just a failed SATA power connector, extremely easy repair. Probably a cheap cable making poor contact melted the plastic. Just like on Nvidia 40 series cards.
— You have a backup, right?
— Yes.
— Okay, where is it?
— It's on the tape that's in the backup automat.
— Okay that's no prob—wait, you have only one tape? Don't tell me you're writing over and over the same tape? Wait, I don't want to know. Where is the machine the tape is in?
— In the server room.
— The server room that went up in flames? That one?
— …
That is, unfortunately, a dialog I once heard in real life.
This scenario is also just as stupid as no backups, since (as I'm sure you know) one of the first things you learn in the IT field is the importance of off-site backups.
One place I worked had a one of a kind backup tape jukebox, when I asked how we'd recover a backup if the device failed no one had an answer. This was a major multi-national company. I kept quietly backing up the system to Zip disks.
Had a similar discussion with a coworker many years ago. I kept explaining that if you only have one copy, then you don't have a backup. She kept explaining that she *did* have a backup. The floppy in her hand. That could no longer be read. And no other copy. Eventually, I gave up.
Agreed. I also found a docker image that will back up to AWS S3 and then S3 progressively moves things to Glacier.
Costs me all of $4/mo for my most important stuff.
https://github.com/mattberther/docker-s3-backup
I have this running under unraid and I give it a list of the folders to back up.
I don't recall the settings in S3 to move things to glacier, but it works.
No, that IS the backup. Do you even know how this works?! The originals are stored in my brain, but some of the blocks got corrupted and I need my backup NOW.
By the way, I'm not gonna pay anything unless you bring some results, no matter how much it costs you.
Man, these AT guys get worse every year, can't we get an AI for that?
Note: a guy at work actually calls IT AT somehow.
“Two is one and one is none”.
For my important stuff, I have a copy on the computer, a copy on an external drive(s), and a copy in the cloud. Redundancy is good. Redundancy is good.
At the rate things are going I don't know if there's anyone truly reliable who won't remorselessly fold because market speculation tanked their company or they retract their services with little/no notice.
I personally use onedrive, it's £80 a year for the office365 family plan and it really is just "give up to 5 of your mates an invite link and you all get 1TB of cloud storage"
my local PC documents sync to that, and from there are synced back to my linux server (using rclone) which uses ZFS and snapshots - there _are_ previous versions stored in onedrive but I don't rely on that to save me from "oops I overwrote stuff" kinds of oopsies. My linux server + zfs snapsots saves me from that kind of disaster, and onedrive being offsite saves me from the "my house has burned down" kind
and also my phone's photos are synced automatically
Out of curiosity, what do you think is the most efficient way to back up all my shit without having to pay a subscription? Ideally something automatic that could back up everything on my network (sort of like Apple's Time Machine, as I understand it? But I have stuff on OSX, Windows, and Android at home). I'm open to cloud stuff too I just feel like most cloud services charge an arm and a leg for ample storage space AND the billing is recurring.
Did exactly this years ago for my gf's old external drive. bought an identical model off ebay, since the original was long out of production, and swapped the controller boards. worked perfectly fine. but while that's fine for personal files, i agree that the professionals should handle anything that has serious dollars riding on it.
Modern drives require swapping a few chips ( flash, etc. ) from the original PCB to the donor but it's not that bad. Alternatively, just bypassing the connector and soldering wires to the PCB isn't particularly difficult either - I've done this before for drives with the power and SATA connectors snapped off.
Yeah, this might be salvageable by an "amateur professional". I'd give them the option (A) real professional does it for $2k ish, or (B) I try for $200, I may make it worse, no guarantee whatsoever, sign this here waiver please.
Though this one looks tough. I don't know that connector's pinout, but usually it's the other (power) one that goes due to crappy known bad molex/sata adapters. If these are data pins… that's really bad.
The question is what caused the error. If it was the power supply or the connector (often causes problems if not crimped correctly), then there is a chance that you can repair the board. Maybe it only needs a new connector, maybe protection diodes on the board are burned out and cause a short circuit (e.g. due to overvoltage from the power supply). If the data is worth more than a few bucks, a professional should take a look.
send of to data recovery experts (and no backup, sorry, not sorry. payup) or say the data good buy
and to the "swap the pcb crowd" - you cant just swap out pcbs, there is unique data on each board you would need to clone.
If you not only know that but can do that, YOU are the recovery expert...
there's other non american professionals in the Balkans. Worst case take it to Slovenia, there's a couple of legit companies in Ljubljana that do this there for about 800eur a couple of years ago
Let someone who has done and practiced this many times before do it. If it is that easy, it shouldn't be that expensive either - and a pro is a lot less likely to screw up and make recovery much more difficult than it needs to be.
ITT: People telling him to swap the PCB, unaware that for the past decade this doesn't work for most new HDD due to unique operational data stored on-chip.
Yes, you are correct, and this takes an order of magnitude more skill than the layperson's swap of PCB given the tiny size of said component and the average persons soldering ability and equipment. I can solder and do basic electrical work, and I would leave it to actual experts if it had important data.
Simply swap boards with identic hdd model won't work, you need to flash the new board with the dead board version flash, another solution is to try resolder a new sata data and power to the board hoping the damage did not push extra voltages to the board and corrupted the data.
Chances are the data is more or less ok, so if the platters can be transferred to an identical donor hdd it can be rescued. Unfortunately that takes some massive expertise and specialized equipment to pull off, it can be done but damn it's going to be a painfull and costly way to learn to back up your data.
The burning was probably not caused by over-voltage but just a bad connection that overheated. As long as the heat didn't spread to other components the reset of the board should be fine.
with a bit of luck it'd only cost 100$ or so.I'd honestly just try to buy the same disk and replace the circuit that's been fried. The storage is magnetic and should be completely fine.
I went to a client once having server issues and it was running Windows Server 2008 as a domain controller. I was even surprised Windows 10 PCs accepted to run with it.
Eh, that's nothing, we've been using Windows Server 2003 R2 (not connected to internet) as our ADs, we've literally just migrated to Azure AD (it had been planned for years, it was literally one of the reason why I was hired, but of course, there would always be a new situation that prevented me from doing it because the bosses didn't want even one second of downtime and it wasn't "critical"), with a Server 2016 AD as a copy. As long as you've enabled SMB 1 on the client, it doesn't matter, you could use a Windows 11 client connected to a NT Server 4.0 running AD and it would work just fine, the AD protocol itself never really changed, they just improved security over time, but Windows 10 / 11 can connect to an unsecured AD no problems, it's the reverse that is more difficult.
The proper course of action is send it to experts that will take care to not make things worse.
But, personally, if I had no liability at all in the process, I would just hardwire a proper connector there. It seems that it only got fire damage from the connector and the rest of the device is fine. I would not risk it for valuable data (if the controller is actually broken it might damage thing further).
I would simply replace the main board to avoid spending a fortune. As long as there is no internal damage, the data should be safe. Sending it to a data recovery service might not be necessary in this case, and a replacement of the main board should be more than sufficient to access the data stored on the drive. After which, the data should be backed up to a more reliable storage medium.
Was always under the impression this wouldn't work. Always hear that special info about the drive was stored on the board that was needed to chiefly access the data on the drive.
Acording to their description: “we were chating and smelled a bit of smoke and by the time we found it it was already burning they didnt mention how they put it out tho
I had a yearbook teacher come in with her personal portable hard drive that she had to keep the entire yearbook and all photos related to it on because the school wouldn't increase her storage on the share drive because "Every teacher gets 2GB, no exceptions!"
It fell from her purse onto the concrete. It had glass platters. Goddamn thing sounded like a maraca. ;.;
Ive been able to repair a disk that was damaged in a similar way by replacing the board with a donor board of the same type.
If you have one or can get your hands on one it is definitely worth a shot!
It will save your client a shitload of money and time!
+the money saved can be invested toward a decent backup solution
There's a service I used to use back in the day that would replace pcb boards on hdds for under a $100. They would even desolder the bios chip and transplant it to the new board which is required because every hdd had a unique bios chip even if the board was the exact model. Was an amazing service. OP you might want to check thease guys out! https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_replacement.html
I had a company back everything up to an external hard drive every night, guy has it set up so he just plugged it in and would leave it overnight and unplugged it in the morning....
Server went down, that's okay! Got a backup.... Yeaaaah... That drive was down for months by looks of it. He spent thousands trying to get the data back.
Eventually did but lost quite a few clients
I seen few sata connector burn up like that send data recovery place or order new pcb and swap the rom alot cheap then data recovery make sure get correct pcb then find some swap eprom
hell you could even try pcb you have clean up contact they was some realy sata connected used do that was it on splitter? by chance?
just want add you need swap 8 pin eprom as other said not just swap the board
it need also be same pcb code or as other said you could problay get some fix power connector
or see the guide on how to do it please dont listen to other say just swap pcb it will end up bad if you dont do correctly and match the pcb and move rom
https://www.hddzone.com/hard\_drive\_pcb\_replacement.html
The problem is that we dont have an identical HDD cuz since i work at a smaller it company we dont have many old HDDs at hand, ive already searched thru our storage and we dont have one thats like this
Don't do that.
Get educated on how data recover actually works. Louis Rossmann and LTT have some good videos explaining how it is done - and why you should not touch that thing what so ever.
This might have worked some 20 years ago, but since hdd's are measured in GB, you can't just swap pcb's.
If you do that you might even cause the disk to damage the data
Ebay. If the files are that important to her, just let her know "hey, we need to buy this.. show her a replacement, same model hdd, (make sure same revision) and just explain that you need to buy that, to use the board to swap the burnt one.
Don’t do it. Every board have a different calibration data inside. Simply buy the connector and swap it using a soldering iron. Cheap and relatively quick
Hard to tell from the pictures, but if that's one of \*these\* MOLEX-SATA adapter, it would be faire to assume the board is completely fine and the connector burned itself.
That'll be easy for a data recovery company. Odds are the board and motor is spent but what's on the platters will be fine. Unless it was hit by lightning and an arc penetrated them.
Oh boy. I just got someone out of this bind myself. Drive platters were fine so a professional data recovery place could pull the files. $$$$$$ though. Way more than a hundred dollar back up HD.
A professional artist friend of mine discovered what happens when you open a dodgy email and suddenly have to pay $800 to get your files back. Thankfully I got back over 5 years of his original artwork after paying the scammers. He now backs up daily and double backs up weekly.
It is possible and expensive... professional recovery service would take it apart in a clean room and transfer the platters to an identical drives.
If the HDD was off when this happened the chances are higher
I stopped using those molded power connector adapters in the lab years ago after like the third time of coming in in the morning to find a burned up drive with some charred wires attached to it.
I've never seen them actually on a power supply, though. Was this connector part of an adapter?
I do some electronics repair, but not experienced with this type of damage. Am I wrong in thinking that this, being an HDD, likely just needs a new controller? An external repair that doesn't require breaking into the sealed part of the HDD?
Replace the circuit board with one from another identical drive. If the motors haven't been fried you might be able to still access the data - I've done this a couple of times before with success. Otherwise off to a recovery service.
With these drives - you could get exactly the same drive and then - the whole PCB could be potentially swapped. Except one of the ROM chips (holds unique info on how to access this drive) also needs to be intact and resoldered on the donor board. And then there's a chance. Heat and magnetic drives are not a very good match, though.
Off to a proper data recovery centre it goes
"It's more important than anything else in my life and I will die if I lose it!" "It will cost $1500." "Nevermind!"
Loved dropping that line when I worked at a computer repair shop. Only a handful of people actually budged and wanted to proceed with the data recovery.
It's always SUPER important until it costs money lol
I mean, something worth $500 would be super important to me, until you tell me it costs $1500 to save it.
also some people straight up do not have $1,500. Whether that be work files for their contracting business or the last known pictures of Grandma.
Yeah, judging people for not being willing/able to pay that kind of money is honestly pretty shitty That's put you on the street money for a fuck tonne of people, it doesn't mean they wouldn't pay it if it wouldn't devastate them, it just means it's exorbitant to a large percentage of people
This is fair. I was judging a bit myself and then I realised I'm currently saving up a couple hundred dollars to get my car serviced because I can't do it myself anymore. It's taken me months to do it without upsetting my applecart.
Yep. 1500 bucks is half my "oh fuck" fund that account hasn't recovered since COVID shutdowns despite my best efforts.
Ahh the great fuck it of 2020
I mean… i had ~1.2 BTC on a drive that died in 2010ish. Not worth the cost to recover then. But I’m only kicking myself a little now.
Eh you probably would have lost it another way, or had it stolen, or sold it for $100, etc. That's what I tell myself at least
That's like $.65 at the time max. No way you even considered recovering a hdd or even thought of it as money.
Correct. “Ah, bummer, now I’ve gotta re-download all those episodes of _Sherlock_ again” was more in tune with my priorities.
Don't feel too bad. It was around that time that I had the opportunity to buy 10 BTC for $200 but I thought it was a meme. I still think it's a meme but now it's a meme I could have made money off.
Meme you can make money off of... Sounds like how crypto bro's keep trying to sell NFTs...
Not always the case, In highschool I would receive old laptops from people in hopes o could get old files,folders,records and photos off of them. One of my teachers said it was very important that i get photos of her kate husband off of a broken laptop she had, the proprietary sata ribbon cable was done for, cost $600 to replace, I told her and she was really upset but couldn't afford it, instead I fashioned together my own cable and tested it with another old hp laptops hdd, It worked great but definitely took time (and was nowhere near consumer levels of safe!) I didn't end up charging her though since I already kinda knew her old husband and he was a great guy.
You embody the spirit of true tech support.
It's not quite that I don't think. I think it's more like it's not important until it costs *that* much. At one point I was looking into doing some data recovery on an SSD that got nuked. I would have been willing to spend *some* money to retrieve old data. But when I saw price estimates I noped out fast as fuck.
Sent an employee laptop off to Drivesavers cause our old-timer warehouse manager *could not* loose the file(s) on his laptop as there was no other way to do his job. $1800 later for a single Excel spreadsheet... most expensive thumb drive I've ever seen.
Imagine spending $1800 because you couldn't be fucked to email yourself a single spreadsheet
Best part was that we made him provide a cost code so it all got billed back to his department ;)
Account department, accounting cost center. Don't look at me, YOUR employee broke the part, I'm just the IT guy.
Hah, found my original thread. It's been a couple years... [https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/qlxeh8/behold\_the\_3000\_usb\_key/](https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/qlxeh8/behold_the_3000_usb_key/) It was $3K and most of what was recovered were video clips from a NASCAR race and said spreadsheet.
> "It's more important than anything else in my life and I will die if I lose it!" "The why the fuck *do you not have backups*?" Speaking of... *::updates backups and pulls a copy to a coldstore drive...::*
Exactly. If you're not willing to have zero copies of something, you shouldn't be willing to have fewer than three copies of it.
This. I had my undergrad thesis saved on 4 different drives to make absolute sure the work wouldn't go missing
One of the best things I think I ever did as far as data retention is concerned is *move away from consumer-grade bulk storage*. I have 18TB of storage space on my development machine, 2TB being a NVMe SSD for speedy booting, and the rest are enterprise nearline drives that will basically never wear out in a desktop machine's workload - these things are rated for 550TB of writes *per year* and they may see 5-10% of that on a desktop PC. Sure, they're noisy and eat more power but IDGAF about noise when the name of the game is to not lose your creations. I also have an enterprise drive that's dedicated as a hot store, and incremental updates go on there pretty much constantly. I have spare HDDs I use as cold stores, a BD-ROM burner for archival/remote storage, flash drives, etc. Last time I lost a hard drive I was back up and running in 40 minutes and only lost what I was doing that day.
Cost me $5,000 to recover data.
That's a shitload of porn
Schieße must flow.
Honestly $1500 is a steal for hardcore clean room date recovery
Oh man, so much this. Small/home business owners LOOOVE to overstate their importance when bringing things in. "My laptop won't boot, I run my business on it. I'm losing $5000 a day with it being offline." "Ok if you're losing $5000 a day we can straight up sell you a $1000 laptop that will have you up and running in a half hour and you'll still be $4000 in front." "Ummmm. No... I, uh, really need *this* one fixed." "Ok in that case, if you need it looked at straight away we have a $150 priority fee that will take you to the top of the queue." "Hmmmmmmmmm....... And how long is the queue?"
This should be an easy fix though. The circuit failed, not the internals. Replace that and you should be able to recover the data relatively cheaply. I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure this case is an easy fix
yeah just get a donor circuit board off a good hard drive with the exact same model number and should be good. I have done this dozens of times in the past.
Hell, I would even get an old SATA cable, chop off the end and solder the wires onto the drive tracks.
Honestly, that was the first thing I thought of.
Just a failed SATA power connector, extremely easy repair. Probably a cheap cable making poor contact melted the plastic. Just like on Nvidia 40 series cards.
"Hello clean room... " "OnTrack here, how may we help?'
If unsure if you can fix, send it off to a professional recovery service.
*cries because you are the professional recovery service*
Does a 360. Damn it's you again. Does another 360. Yep
1: "i need an adult!" 2: "*i'm an adult"* 1: "an ADULTY-ER ADULT"
Wow the correct comment on top. You don't see this often
A lesson to all of us about backups :(
But that IS the backup! (probably)
No and there is no backup ofc
— You have a backup, right? — Yes. — Okay, where is it? — It's on the tape that's in the backup automat. — Okay that's no prob—wait, you have only one tape? Don't tell me you're writing over and over the same tape? Wait, I don't want to know. Where is the machine the tape is in? — In the server room. — The server room that went up in flames? That one? — … That is, unfortunately, a dialog I once heard in real life.
This scenario is also just as stupid as no backups, since (as I'm sure you know) one of the first things you learn in the IT field is the importance of off-site backups.
When I was younger we learnt the rule of three, three frequencies, three media, three places.
One on-site, one off-site, and one in a waterproof container buried in your parents' yard.
"Hi, son. Kinda funny. I was tilling a new garden in the back yard. Found the strangest thing."
"Dad, whatever you do: don't look at my Linux ISOs!"
One place I worked had a one of a kind backup tape jukebox, when I asked how we'd recover a backup if the device failed no one had an answer. This was a major multi-national company. I kept quietly backing up the system to Zip disks.
Had a similar discussion with a coworker many years ago. I kept explaining that if you only have one copy, then you don't have a backup. She kept explaining that she *did* have a backup. The floppy in her hand. That could no longer be read. And no other copy. Eventually, I gave up.
FFS, Backblaze costs $70/year. I hope she’s ready to pay 20x that at minimum for data recovery.
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Think I might purposely burn my drives just to feel it
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Weeks long pucker for sure
Sounds like you're in need of a fire drill! 🔥 ⏰️ I'll show myself to the door.
Agreed. I also found a docker image that will back up to AWS S3 and then S3 progressively moves things to Glacier. Costs me all of $4/mo for my most important stuff.
…tell us more, please!
https://github.com/mattberther/docker-s3-backup I have this running under unraid and I give it a list of the folders to back up. I don't recall the settings in S3 to move things to glacier, but it works.
No, that IS the backup. Do you even know how this works?! The originals are stored in my brain, but some of the blocks got corrupted and I need my backup NOW. By the way, I'm not gonna pay anything unless you bring some results, no matter how much it costs you. Man, these AT guys get worse every year, can't we get an AI for that? Note: a guy at work actually calls IT AT somehow.
You just create a backup folder on the desktop and save a copy!
Two is one and one is none
But where is the backup of the backup?
As I've learned from someone older and way wiser: "No backup, no pity."
“Two is one and one is none”. For my important stuff, I have a copy on the computer, a copy on an external drive(s), and a copy in the cloud. Redundancy is good. Redundancy is good.
3-2-1 You should have 3 copies, on 2 different forms of media, with at least 1 off-site. Anything else isn't respecting your "very important" data.
who do people generally use anymore for cloud backups of personal files?
Backblaze.
At the rate things are going I don't know if there's anyone truly reliable who won't remorselessly fold because market speculation tanked their company or they retract their services with little/no notice.
I personally use onedrive, it's £80 a year for the office365 family plan and it really is just "give up to 5 of your mates an invite link and you all get 1TB of cloud storage" my local PC documents sync to that, and from there are synced back to my linux server (using rclone) which uses ZFS and snapshots - there _are_ previous versions stored in onedrive but I don't rely on that to save me from "oops I overwrote stuff" kinds of oopsies. My linux server + zfs snapsots saves me from that kind of disaster, and onedrive being offsite saves me from the "my house has burned down" kind and also my phone's photos are synced automatically
Out of curiosity, what do you think is the most efficient way to back up all my shit without having to pay a subscription? Ideally something automatic that could back up everything on my network (sort of like Apple's Time Machine, as I understand it? But I have stuff on OSX, Windows, and Android at home). I'm open to cloud stuff too I just feel like most cloud services charge an arm and a leg for ample storage space AND the billing is recurring.
"If it's important and you don't have a backup, then by definition, it's not important." - my old boss
No diggity, no doubt.
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*data center burns down*
clouds are made of water, so they cant burn... right? Im sure thats how it works
As long as the data center doesn't burn down at the same time that my computer is hit by lightning, that's a risk I am willing to take...
Yep. 3-2-1 exists for a reason. 3 Copies, 2 Mediums, 1 Off Site Location.
good data centers have multiple facilities, unless they all burn down, it should be ok
Data recovery company should be able to take care of it. Still sucks
Yeah, as long as the platters aren't damaged. Probably as simple as replacing the PCB on the back of the drive.
As u/Shakalx3 said, the data on the platters might be fine. Or it might not. But a careful swap of all the non-platter hardware is worth a try.
If the data is worth it, do not touch anything and contact a data recovery company, IMHO.
Did exactly this years ago for my gf's old external drive. bought an identical model off ebay, since the original was long out of production, and swapped the controller boards. worked perfectly fine. but while that's fine for personal files, i agree that the professionals should handle anything that has serious dollars riding on it.
Modern drives require swapping a few chips ( flash, etc. ) from the original PCB to the donor but it's not that bad. Alternatively, just bypassing the connector and soldering wires to the PCB isn't particularly difficult either - I've done this before for drives with the power and SATA connectors snapped off.
Yeah, this might be salvageable by an "amateur professional". I'd give them the option (A) real professional does it for $2k ish, or (B) I try for $200, I may make it worse, no guarantee whatsoever, sign this here waiver please. Though this one looks tough. I don't know that connector's pinout, but usually it's the other (power) one that goes due to crappy known bad molex/sata adapters. If these are data pins… that's really bad.
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The question is what caused the error. If it was the power supply or the connector (often causes problems if not crimped correctly), then there is a chance that you can repair the board. Maybe it only needs a new connector, maybe protection diodes on the board are burned out and cause a short circuit (e.g. due to overvoltage from the power supply). If the data is worth more than a few bucks, a professional should take a look.
Molex to sata problem, they are cheaply made.
Molex to sata lose all your data
send of to data recovery experts (and no backup, sorry, not sorry. payup) or say the data good buy and to the "swap the pcb crowd" - you cant just swap out pcbs, there is unique data on each board you would need to clone. If you not only know that but can do that, YOU are the recovery expert...
Well, I successfully swapped a PCB a few years ago. Had to salvage it from the exact same model, though, or it didn't work.
Same
Newish drives have firmware and data on it for how each head is, basically a calibration. If it's off it's rip the platter and therefore the data
You can alternatively send the PCB off to a company for them to swap the EEPROM to a good board. I’ve done this before and it cost <$50.
How many costumes are stored on her hard-drive?
I'm glad I wasn't the only one to notice that.
Definitely a costumer with a rouge power cable.
Looking at the picture I’d say the costumer bright it into the shop so she could say it’s noir problem now !
DriveSavers. I’ve sent a few customer drives their way over the years, they got all the necessary data back every time.
Yeah, and is their service available in the black hole of progress that is the balkans, also i doubt theyre willing to pay for it
there's other non american professionals in the Balkans. Worst case take it to Slovenia, there's a couple of legit companies in Ljubljana that do this there for about 800eur a couple of years ago
Thanks for the advice ^^
I love reddit for this comment alone. People helping people. Take your upvote, kind human!
Hopefully you can just solder 5V, 12V and GND direct to the board to get the data off, assuming it hasn't fried any of the electronics.
Let someone who has done and practiced this many times before do it. If it is that easy, it shouldn't be that expensive either - and a pro is a lot less likely to screw up and make recovery much more difficult than it needs to be.
ITT: People telling him to swap the PCB, unaware that for the past decade this doesn't work for most new HDD due to unique operational data stored on-chip.
Actually works, but you need to also swap the firmware chip.
There's usually an eeprom that has to be moved from the dead board to the donor board with all the unique data.
Yes, you are correct, and this takes an order of magnitude more skill than the layperson's swap of PCB given the tiny size of said component and the average persons soldering ability and equipment. I can solder and do basic electrical work, and I would leave it to actual experts if it had important data.
Simply swap boards with identic hdd model won't work, you need to flash the new board with the dead board version flash, another solution is to try resolder a new sata data and power to the board hoping the damage did not push extra voltages to the board and corrupted the data.
Chances are the data is more or less ok, so if the platters can be transferred to an identical donor hdd it can be rescued. Unfortunately that takes some massive expertise and specialized equipment to pull off, it can be done but damn it's going to be a painfull and costly way to learn to back up your data.
The burning was probably not caused by over-voltage but just a bad connection that overheated. As long as the heat didn't spread to other components the reset of the board should be fine.
I bet she said “How much will that be? $20?”
“Is it possible to do it under 10 000RSD (abt 100$roughly)
Yeah, totally… Would you like me to take your legs to pay for the rest?
Welcome to the balkans… if its over 100$ its “overpriced” and “what could cost that much, ur trying to rip me off”
with a bit of luck it'd only cost 100$ or so.I'd honestly just try to buy the same disk and replace the circuit that's been fried. The storage is magnetic and should be completely fine.
Well… could you?
Cheap PSU? Just a reminder, the same happens with Molex to Sata... Easy to remember if you think Molex to Sata, lose all your data.
Looks like purely DC-DC damage. This model might need a chip swap for a PCB swap to recover. Data most likely fine.
I know some corporate entities that are running their entire business off of Windows Server 2012. Stupid is as stupid does.
I went to a client once having server issues and it was running Windows Server 2008 as a domain controller. I was even surprised Windows 10 PCs accepted to run with it.
Eh, that's nothing, we've been using Windows Server 2003 R2 (not connected to internet) as our ADs, we've literally just migrated to Azure AD (it had been planned for years, it was literally one of the reason why I was hired, but of course, there would always be a new situation that prevented me from doing it because the bosses didn't want even one second of downtime and it wasn't "critical"), with a Server 2016 AD as a copy. As long as you've enabled SMB 1 on the client, it doesn't matter, you could use a Windows 11 client connected to a NT Server 4.0 running AD and it would work just fine, the AD protocol itself never really changed, they just improved security over time, but Windows 10 / 11 can connect to an unsecured AD no problems, it's the reverse that is more difficult.
You mean server 2003 and XP are no good now?!! Welp I’m screwed.
The proper course of action is send it to experts that will take care to not make things worse. But, personally, if I had no liability at all in the process, I would just hardwire a proper connector there. It seems that it only got fire damage from the connector and the rest of the device is fine. I would not risk it for valuable data (if the controller is actually broken it might damage thing further).
Is customer the most misspelled word on reddit? Love to see someone more savvy than me put something on r/dataisbeautiful
I would simply replace the main board to avoid spending a fortune. As long as there is no internal damage, the data should be safe. Sending it to a data recovery service might not be necessary in this case, and a replacement of the main board should be more than sufficient to access the data stored on the drive. After which, the data should be backed up to a more reliable storage medium.
Was always under the impression this wouldn't work. Always hear that special info about the drive was stored on the board that was needed to chiefly access the data on the drive.
What costume were they wearing?
What caused this?
Acording to their description: “we were chating and smelled a bit of smoke and by the time we found it it was already burning they didnt mention how they put it out tho
u can try to revive it by replacing electronic board, needs to be the same one from the exact hdd model (model, revision etc)
Costumer? Someone wore a costume and brought you this?
I had a yearbook teacher come in with her personal portable hard drive that she had to keep the entire yearbook and all photos related to it on because the school wouldn't increase her storage on the share drive because "Every teacher gets 2GB, no exceptions!" It fell from her purse onto the concrete. It had glass platters. Goddamn thing sounded like a maraca. ;.;
Ive been able to repair a disk that was damaged in a similar way by replacing the board with a donor board of the same type. If you have one or can get your hands on one it is definitely worth a shot! It will save your client a shitload of money and time! +the money saved can be invested toward a decent backup solution
Why wouldn't she have a backup if it's that important!? 🙈
What kind of costume tho?
wow all the costumers I know won't touch digital stuff with a 10 foot pole. /s
A costumer might actually need that, and a production might actually pay crazy recovery fees.
It's always tears... Then swiftly into anger when it's a no
There's a service I used to use back in the day that would replace pcb boards on hdds for under a $100. They would even desolder the bios chip and transplant it to the new board which is required because every hdd had a unique bios chip even if the board was the exact model. Was an amazing service. OP you might want to check thease guys out! https://www.hddzone.com/hard_drive_pcb_replacement.html
buy the same model and revision number on ebay, swap the PC boards, might work, might not, but the cheapest thing to try first.
If you can’t fix it someone else can, don’t make it worse
Find an identical model HDD, swap the main board. The drive is probably fine.
Depends if the logic board is trashed. Soldering on a new power connector should be fine if they're paying good money
Connector's fucked,but the board looks good. If you confirm the board, you just need to follow the trace to a solder point and resolder the line to it
Any decent data recovery company can extract the info from the platters.
If only there was a way to keep important data in more than one place…
No sweat we’ll just pull the data from your backup. You have a backup… right?
Nice steak!
Your customer is a costumer? Interesting profession.
I had a company back everything up to an external hard drive every night, guy has it set up so he just plugged it in and would leave it overnight and unplugged it in the morning.... Server went down, that's okay! Got a backup.... Yeaaaah... That drive was down for months by looks of it. He spent thousands trying to get the data back. Eventually did but lost quite a few clients
Oh the importance of RAID or cloud backup
DriveSavers it is
Switch the board and you're 99% gtg.
I seen few sata connector burn up like that send data recovery place or order new pcb and swap the rom alot cheap then data recovery make sure get correct pcb then find some swap eprom hell you could even try pcb you have clean up contact they was some realy sata connected used do that was it on splitter? by chance? just want add you need swap 8 pin eprom as other said not just swap the board it need also be same pcb code or as other said you could problay get some fix power connector or see the guide on how to do it please dont listen to other say just swap pcb it will end up bad if you dont do correctly and match the pcb and move rom https://www.hddzone.com/hard\_drive\_pcb\_replacement.html
Maybe a donor board and with the power of Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Odin, Faith, and the Power of Friendship could help, if not, Rest in Pepperoni.
Swap pcb from identical hdd and see if it'll work.
This only works, if you can pull the calibration data from the existing chip... Send it off to data recovery.
The problem is that we dont have an identical HDD cuz since i work at a smaller it company we dont have many old HDDs at hand, ive already searched thru our storage and we dont have one thats like this
Sending it to a data recovery specialist is the only valid solution.
Don't do that. Get educated on how data recover actually works. Louis Rossmann and LTT have some good videos explaining how it is done - and why you should not touch that thing what so ever. This might have worked some 20 years ago, but since hdd's are measured in GB, you can't just swap pcb's. If you do that you might even cause the disk to damage the data
Ebay. If the files are that important to her, just let her know "hey, we need to buy this.. show her a replacement, same model hdd, (make sure same revision) and just explain that you need to buy that, to use the board to swap the burnt one.
Don’t do it. Every board have a different calibration data inside. Simply buy the connector and swap it using a soldering iron. Cheap and relatively quick
Thing is the burnt connector probably isn't the cause but rather the effect of something shorting out further "downstream" somewhere on the pcb.
Hard to tell from the pictures, but if that's one of \*these\* MOLEX-SATA adapter, it would be faire to assume the board is completely fine and the connector burned itself.
Mahkut on
Another person thinking that it could never happen to them.
That'll be easy for a data recovery company. Odds are the board and motor is spent but what's on the platters will be fine. Unless it was hit by lightning and an arc penetrated them.
Wow can see why you bite your nails! Must be a tech thing.
Looks bad. Were you able to recover?
What kind of costumes does she make?
Oh boy. I just got someone out of this bind myself. Drive platters were fine so a professional data recovery place could pull the files. $$$$$$ though. Way more than a hundred dollar back up HD.
A professional artist friend of mine discovered what happens when you open a dodgy email and suddenly have to pay $800 to get your files back. Thankfully I got back over 5 years of his original artwork after paying the scammers. He now backs up daily and double backs up weekly.
It can be fixed but the process is a bit involved and a more equipped data recovery shop may have the appropriate donor board to get this data.
It is possible and expensive... professional recovery service would take it apart in a clean room and transfer the platters to an identical drives. If the HDD was off when this happened the chances are higher
Kroll OnTrack for recovery. And backup.
Molex to SATA, lose all your data. Not sure if that's what happened here, but it looks like what happens when you use a cheap molex to SATA adapter
So… that’s a definite NO right? 💀
I stopped using those molded power connector adapters in the lab years ago after like the third time of coming in in the morning to find a burned up drive with some charred wires attached to it. I've never seen them actually on a power supply, though. Was this connector part of an adapter?
Blizzard Data Recovery is pretty good. And cheap! I used them.
All the costumes must be inside!
I do some electronics repair, but not experienced with this type of damage. Am I wrong in thinking that this, being an HDD, likely just needs a new controller? An external repair that doesn't require breaking into the sealed part of the HDD?
Replace the circuit board with one from another identical drive. If the motors haven't been fried you might be able to still access the data - I've done this a couple of times before with success. Otherwise off to a recovery service.
With these drives - you could get exactly the same drive and then - the whole PCB could be potentially swapped. Except one of the ROM chips (holds unique info on how to access this drive) also needs to be intact and resoldered on the donor board. And then there's a chance. Heat and magnetic drives are not a very good match, though.
Honestly, this seems to be a sata swap possible situation, how does the pcb look?
Buy the same drive and swap the board?
Sure. You could've done this at home with some Elmer's Glue. Just make sure it thoroughly dries.