Owen - I've recovered drives with failed electronics before, same as Mark Shuford describes. I was using Maxtor drives in the 6-9GB range, and realized the electronics were identical, except that each board had different "code names" on the solder mask: I think one was "leopard" and the other was "tiger" or something like that. They were, at one time, using this convention to distinguish releases of the electronics.
Anyway: I took the dead 6GB drive, put the board on from a 9GB drive and was once again able to see the data. I copied the data off, wiped the original data, then restored the broke electronic board to the failed Maxtor drive. *customer testimonal, not spam* I exchanged the drive under Maxtor's "advance replacement" program. They treated me so well that I've stuck with their products ever since (and have had only that one failure in about 8 years of using their drives. *end of testimonial* JKB On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 20:32 -0400, Owen Berry wrote: > This morning my wife's computer crashed, the hard drive started making > clicking noises, and, when rebooted would get past the BIOS startup and > then stop with a flashing cursor in the top left hand corner of the > screen. The only good sign is that the BIOS detects the hard drive. > > Seems pretty bad. My first thought was to try to recover whatever > possible using Knoppix. Tried booting off the CD, but all I got was the > flashing cursor. Went into the BIOS and double checked that the CD drive > came before the hard drive in terms of startup devices - it was. To be > sure, I changed all 3 options to be the CD drive. Still the same result. > > I tried unplugging the hard drive and then booting off Knoppix, and > everything worked fine. Any ideas what I could be missing here? > > Thanks. > > -- Owen > > -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
