[Eug-lug] Damaged hard drive

[alan]

On Fri, 18 May 2007, abrown at peak.org wrote:

> I damaged my hard drive. The BIOS intermittently recognizes it.
> Not sure what happened.  Best I can figure I must have zapped
> it with static.
>
> Sometimes static will weaken transistors without completely
> killing them.  That would be consistent with the symptoms.
> The ATA pins are working, just not at spec.  And not well
> enough for the computer to read the drive.
>
> Do any of you know who can read a damaged drive?  If my guess
> is right, this will be more than playing with software.  It
> will require some hardware smarts.
>
> I have reconstructed quite a bit from other computers and hard
> drives.  But there are a lot of things I didn't have backed up.

If you have another of the same exact model of hard drive, sometimes you 
can swap the controller board.  Just make sure you back up that drive 
first in case you have some other problem that eats controller boards.

-- 
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
                                   - Alan Cox