An Attempt at Data Recovery

An Attempt at Data Recovery
July 5, 2007

Many Gigabytes of volunteer pictures, movies and other data was stored on external disk drives that were damaged by the heat and fire. (Click picture for a higher resolution inage.)

Steve thought it might be worth looking at the actual disk drive inside the case.

To everyone's surprise, the actual hard drive didn't look too bad. So Steve decided to attempt a data recovery

Since the external case was destroyed, a new interface was needed. A simple IDE to USB interface was chosen (blue connector on the hard drive) with separate individual power for the hard drive.

In the unlikely event that data recovered an external Firewire disk was connected to the setup. To isolate the computer in case the suspect hard drive put a power spike on the USB, a USB hub was inserted between the computer and the hard drive.

Multiple power strips were used so that the suspect hard drive could be switched on and off quickly in case there was a problem.

Finally, an explosion shield was applied in case applying power to the hard drive caused a violent result.

So what happened?

When the suspect hard drive was powered on, it appears to power up normally. The internal disk was clearly spinning. A light on the IDE interface came on. Unfortunately, those were the only positive signs. After that, the computer failed to recognize the hard drive. Error messages related to the USB/IDE device appeared in the system messages file.

So then end of the story so far is that no data was recovered. If you have any ideas let us know.
Contact via email s g s @ p a n i x . c o m

Many Gigabytes of volunteer pictures, movies and other data was stored on external disk drives that were damaged by the heat and fire.	(Click picture for a higher resolution inage.)
Steve thought it might be worth looking at the actual disk drive inside the case.
To everyone's surprise, the actual hard drive didn't look too bad. So Steve decided to attempt a data recovery
Since the external case was destroyed, a new interface was needed. A simple IDE to USB interface was chosen (blue connector on the hard drive) with separate individual power for the hard drive.
In the unlikely event that data recovered an external Firewire disk was connected to the setup. To isolate the computer in case the suspect hard drive put a power spike on the USB, a USB hub was inserted between the computer and the hard drive.
Multiple power strips were used so that the suspect hard drive could be switched on and off quickly in case there was a problem.
Finally, an explosion shield was applied in case applying power to the hard drive caused a violent result.