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Data recovery off Seagate Barracudas.
Tuesday 17th September 2019
I am so proud of my partner!
This isn't something that I would normally post about but, we recently had a death in the family, my girlfriends power supply unit had a surge, and killed 2 of her hard disk drives.
She has been rather upset about the whole incident up until last night when she was able to fully recover her data.
This was after obtaining a few quotes from a few data recovery services. - the quotes were north of $5000.
I was lucky enough to talk to a few colleagues in my department who had also previously accomplished data recovery and learned a few nuances from it. - Unfortunately, it's not as simple as it was in the old days where you could just swap the logic board out, nowadays they're tuned from the factory.
Not only did she manage to recover data off 2x dead hard drives, but these drives were Seagate Barracudas!
And she troubleshooted a logic board failure caused by over voltage or a power-surge (on both drives) and managed to de-solder the transient-voltage-suppression diode and bypass 2x 0hm resistors by dobbing solder on them.
This saved us about $2000 in data recovery fees if we had to take them to a professional, it didn't take much but it was enough to get the drives spinning again so that we could dump the contents.
In our case we got extremely lucky, as we had an idea of what caused the drives to fail in the first place, so my partner was able to troubleshoot it accordingly.
From her original post:
Holy Shit. I DID IT!
Armed with a pair of side cutters, a shoddy soldering iron and lots of google. I've successfully recovered the entire contents of one of my dead HDDs
I had two 2TB drives die on me few weeks ago from a power surge. Data recovery services are expensive. Screw that. Tinker time.
I learnt today: Most HDDs have diodes to protect sensitive components from power surges called TVS Diodes.
So with the guidance of an ancient forum post. I tested the diodes, found they had indeed blown and dove straight in snipping these diodes off. Only for disappointment. Still dead.
Further testing lead to these 0ohm resistors, also damaged reading a resistance of 180ohms... not ideal but fixed with a slathering of solder.
(The soldering irons tip isnt hot enough. It was a clumsy job) I was convinced it fried. I cooked it. It's gone. But I screwed it back up and plugged it in to check. Only to find IT FUCKING WORKED. I had the drive running for hours. Long enough to dump the entire contents to safety.
So in short:
BACK UP YOUR DATA
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