20 Jan
2016
20 Jan
'16
4:26 p.m.
On January 20, 2016 at 5:06:19 PM, Eric Christopherson (echristopherson at gmail.com)
wrote:
It can work. But I remember reading that each PCB keeps track of bad?
physical blocks; if you transplant the PCB from another drive, you might?
end up with a different set of bad blocks beings saved.?
I still haven't gotten rich enough to use his services, but I've talked?
to this guy named Scott Moulton, who charges $50 evaluation fee + $750?
per drive. He also teaches classes on doing it yourself (for big bucks).?
His web site is <http://myharddrivedied.com/>.?
I?ve worked with Scott Moulton. He?s reasonable compared to some vendors. YMMV, but I find
him to be extremely helpful. You can email his firm and they will talk over options with
you before you send the drive in. The $50 does not obligate you to anything (other than
the $50).
I can?t recall exactly what he told me but many modern drives have a chip on it that would
need to be moved to a donor PCB in order to spin up the drive. I want to say there is some
encryption involved the the chip provides. It?s been too long since I received that email
from him and I can?t find it.
Also, it?s worth doing a little bit of Googling for modern drives and problems. I got
_very_ lucky one day with a drive which was known to have a firmware bug in it that would
occasionally lose its ability to determine the drive size. With help from the web, I was
able to rig up a USB-to-TTL converter, connect to certain pins on the drive, then access
the firmware shell and repair the drive. I don?t want to give any indication that this was
easy. It took quite a few days of trying. Not only did it involve the converter, but there
was a process where you?d insert paper between certain PCB contacts and the hard drive to
interrupt the spin-up process as that was your window to get access to the firmware. But
it actually worked and I was able to image the drive and move the contents to a new
drive.?
So put the model number into Google and see if you can find a common failure that has a
fix.?
Cheers,
m