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hard drive resurrection [I'm desperate!]

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superboyac:
Hi everyone, this is a problem I have had for over a year now.  Last year, my 80GB IBM deskstar (aka Deathstar) drive stopped spinning.  I had all mp3's on that drive and a lot of them are fairly rare, and I'll never get them back.  I was devastated.

There were no clonking noises or anything, the hard drive just stopped spinning.  A week before, while the computer was on, the hard stopped spinning, but once I rebooted it was ok.  I should have taken it as a warning and transferred my files, but I was lazy and stupid so I didn't.

I've looked at data recovery services and they are all expensive.  I'm trying to keep the cost under $200 if possible.  I've already spend $75 buying an identical hard drive.  I switched the circuit board under the drive with the new one, and I plugged it in.  The hard drive spins, but the computer will not recognize that the drive exists.  So, now I don't know what to do.  When switching the boards, someone told me that not only do I have to make sure that the two drives are the exact same model, but the part number and factory number, etc., have to be the same also.  Well, I know that the model number and all that is the same, but there is one part number that is different.  So maybe that's the problem.

If anyone has other suggestions on what I can do, please let me know.  Would it be possible to somehow open the drive and transfer the heads to the working drive, or is that way too risky for an amateur like me to do?  Is there any way to get the old drive with the switched circuit board to be recognized on the computer?

Thanks.  Help!

lanux128:
sorry about the problem... but you can try using SpinRite.

tinyvillager:

 When it comes to the drive not being recognized,their are several things that can cause this.
The first thing that will stop you cold is that itty bitty little jumper you'll find next to where you
plug your cables into on the back of your drive,learn how to set that.Second try getting into
your bios,personally i get into mine by pressing the Del button while the machine is booting,i'm
not in front of your machine so it's hard for me to say what you should fiddle with but their are
settings in there that can cause your drive not to be recognized.But in my humble opinion try
messing with jumpers on the back of your drive.

Rover:
Is it not spinning becuase the circuits are gone or becuase the motor is gone?  The way to tell is to see if it appears in the BIOS.  No drive in the BIOS probably means the circuits are toasted.  Your kind of SOL if thats the case.  A bad motor can sometime be fixed by .... Freezing the drive.  I'm not kidding.  This is a one-time, back it up now and picth the drive when done solution, that SOMETIMES works. 

Put the drive in the freezer for a day or so.
Get everything set up so you can copy your data off the drive. (have the case open, connectors ready, jumpers set.)
Take the drive out of the freezer, and plug it in.
Boot your system and immediately start copying if you can see the files.
Copy until you're done.

Chances are good the bad drive will never work again after you do this, so make it a last resort.

superboyac:
Well, I'm pretty sure the problem I have is the circuit board on the drive, it must have got fried somehow.  The reason why I'm convinced of that is because when I put the new circuit board on the broken drive, the drive spins right up, no problem.  But the problem then is that the computer doesn't recognize the drive.  That being said, I don't think there's a physical motor problem, so I shouldn't have to resort to the whole freezing thing.

I can't use Spinrite, because the drive won't be detected.

I tried changing the jumpers from master to slave to cable select, but nothing works, and I tried going into the BIOS and it doesn't see the drive in there either.  I also tried putting it on a completely different IDE cable by disconnecting my dvd and cd drive, but the computer still can't detect it.

Is it that big a deal that the hard drive's part number is different, even though it's the exact same model hard drive with the same year and other information printed on the drive?

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