"Meat Plow" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 31 Oct 2007 09:33:36 +0000, Arfa Daily wrote:


"Meat Plow" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 20:32:15 -0500, Jamie wrote:

Meat Plow wrote:

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:17:01 -0400, PeterD wrote:


On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:26:59 -0700, SCIENCE
wrote:


Hey guys, my 160 GB SATA Hard Disk is not working . It just happened
when i connected to older
PC due to low watt from SMPS, than a Brilliant White Smoke came,
immediately i switched off the power supply. when i check the Hard
Disk the Capacitor has Burnt, Assuming it should not cause any damage
to the hard disk. Now i want that PCB of 160 GB Seagate Hard Disk in
order to replace the burnt one . Can you help me ? where do i get
that
PCB ? Please............

Not an option, there is information about the drive platters, heads,
etc, stored on NVRAM on the card. Any other card won't hve the right
information.


Why not if the heads and the platters are the same which they should
be
in
an identical drive. Critical data is stored on an engineering track on
the
media itself, not nvram.

Drive controllers mask out bad sections in the drive.
2 identical drives with the same contents may have different mappings
on the platter.

Care to share where you read that? Apparently I've been in error all
these
years thinking this data was written to an engineering track.


Hi Meat - how's it going ? HDDs are funny things. I had my 20GB data
drive
fail the other day. One minute it was fine, next I couldn't access it.
Very
odd too (well I think anyway) that it is spinning ok, and the BIOS
correctly
'sees' it, and correctly reports its model, size, cluster size and so on,
but when you boot Windoze, a message regarding failure of the secondary
slave HD flashes up - so quickly, of course, that you just can't quite
read
it properly. Windoze doesn't see it at all - it just doesn't appear in
the
drive management screen, so you can't even attempt to force it to a
manual
mount. Just for sport I tried it in another machine running '2000 rather
than XP, and again, BIOS sees it fine, but not the OS. I suppose I could
have tried in DOS, but by then, I had lost interest and replaced it with
a
250GB drive which cost less than a good meal out, and restored it
contents
from the external backup drive that I maintain (there's a lesson for the
OP
to learn there, methinks ...) I've still got the drive, and have a friend
who makes a (very good !!) living from disc data recovery, so I might let
him have a look one of these days when I'm passing his shop, just out of
curiosity.

Just as a matter of interest, as well as the "Well just how much is your
lost data worth, sir ?" angle of his business, he has also invested a
considerable amount of money in the software and hardware to do the job,
and
sometimes, recovering the data can be very labour-intensive. Probably
doesn't *justify* the large amounts of money that he can (and does)
charge
for the service, but might go some way to mitigating his rates ...

Arfa

Good story and references Arf. I keep nothing but an operating system and
temporary data on the drive in my PC. My data is stored on a network
storage server (Linksys NSLU2) utilizing two 300 gig drives, one of which
is hidden. Every morning at 3 am, a changed file and incremental backup
from the visible to hidden drive occurs automatically. Should the visable
drive fail (has happened once in the past 3 years) I merely make the
hidden drive the main drive (plug it into USB port 1) and all my data is
there. Then I replace the hidden drive and life goes on all happy happy.
If perhaps the NSLU2 itself were to fail, I have purchased another just in
case. If I had not done that, the file system is a linux ext2 IIRC and all
data could be transferred effortlessly to this PC. Ive got about 450 bucks
into this strategy to maintain the integrity of my critical data and it is
as good a solution as you will find anywhere at any price. There is one
drawback that being network transfer rates. Even at switched 10/100, large
files take awhile to transfer but I don't store a lot of those. I store
and actively work on mostly pictures from my digital camera, my email
database, and documents I have created or modified. Somehow speed is of
little concern because I'm sure that when catastrophe strikes, I grab a
drive cloned with my operating system off the shelf and I'm back in
business in less than 10 minutes. I really cringe when I see people
storing hundreds gigs worth of data on there only PC hard disk. At the
very least buy an external USB drive people.


It's a simple USB drive that I use for backup, and mine takes place
automatically every morning at 3:15am. I actually had to alter the partion
sizes on it after I replaced the data drive with the big one, because
without really thinking about it too clearly, I created a 'data' and a
'spare' partition on the new drive, that were just a little larger than the
partitions that I had already on the backup drive, so of course, the first
time the new drive with its restored data on, came to be backed up, the
backup software rejected the operation, because the destination partition
just wasn't quite big enough by a few hundred meg, to accommodate the source
drive. Doh! Still, it was just a case of reformat the external drive with
partitions that were big enough, plus a bit to allow for future bad blocks,
and then creating a new backup set, and then restarting the backup
scheduler. Know what you mean about the speed though. It took it 21 hours to
transfer all the data back to the USB drive. Just a few minutes a night
again now, as only the changed files / folders get included.

Arfa