SATA interface for EIDE drive?

Buy a new disk. "Old", "EIDE" suggest it can't be bigger than 500G to begin with. So, less than $50 of kit at stake.

Of course, if you're doing this because its *contents* are precious, you have now learned the valuable lesson of why backups are important!

:>

On Mon, 25 May 2015 10:54:48 -0700, cameo Gave us:

The board is tied to the drive. It gets configured at the factory, and there are hard sector flags which get written to it. The info gets kept on the drive controller. I doubt there is any way to 'revive' the drive yourself, but WD will preform data recovery on it for you, at a substantial cost.

It has nothing to do with the interface. There are things which the drive has done to it upon initial 'configuration' which gets stored on the controller PCB.

Those boys at the factory, however can open the drive and perform direct read access on it, and 'recover' files. You... likely not.

Emergency data recovery should be a lot cheaper than it used to be, but it isn't.

You might be lucky if you can find the exact drive and swap the controller card. I did this once a long time ago with success and probably a lot of luck, but I never managed it a second time... Deffo no chance fitting a SATA card- chalk and cheese.

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I've done it dozens of times, and it usually works. The trick is, you have to have the same drive manufacture series (the old Quantum Fireball drives had 4G, 6G, and 13G drives with interchangeable controllers). The clue is when you examine the motor and disk head connections: if those don't line up, your data won't be forthcoming.

There MIGHT nowadays be calibration data in flash on the controller, but it always used to be on the tracks that were read at self-test time.

Indeed it is for the content and IT WAS my backup drive in an external USB2 enclosure. I backed up the HD of my old PC that I then recycled after wiping its HD.

My research indicates that Western Digital enhanced IDE drives are unfortunately more tied to specific PCBs than other brands.

Once you recycled the ORIGINAL drive ("old PC") then this was no longer a backup but, rather, THE original! (any time you have only one copy of data, *that's* the original!)

Next time, pull the drive out of your PC before recycling -- at least until you have verified the contents have been transfered to another device (in addition to your "backup")

There are IDESATAIDE adapters that do a perfect job; allowing a PATA drive "look" exactly like a SATA drive for your modern computer, and they are fairly inexpensive (I use the one by HDE). And there are IDE/SATAIDE adapters that work reasonably well; i prefer the Prudent Way version (more reliable).

• NOPE! The copy or second drive can have different contents (less, more,altered). Then the original might get clobbered...leaving one with a source for possible re-construction (hopefully onto a THIRD drive). Whether that original drive exists or not now, whether its contents are scrambled or not, makes NO DIFFERENCE. I can claim that i have a PERFECT COPY of his original, but that is all i have..a perfect copy - it ain't the original. Kapish?

OP said his drive PCB is toasted; so, no PATA or any other interface to convert.

Don's point is that once the OP recycled the original drive, his backup became the only source of data to recover from. So, he violated the backup rule (of not having one). Perfect copy or not is not so important.

Exactly.

I keep most of my archive "cold" -- have done so for many decades (why spin all that media if you're only rarely going to access it?!)

I pulled a 4G volume (back when they were $1,000/ea) off the shelf, installed it (external SCSI enclosure), spun it up, mounted it... and noticed the drive was completely SCRAMBLED!

"WTF???"

OK, no problem. Set it aside and pull the *backup* copy (an identical

4G drive -- same model, etc.). Installed it, spun it up, mounted it... and noticed it *too* was scrambled!

"Ummm... two drives sitting in a cool dark room won't both exhibit the same failure mode independently! Something scwewy is happening, here..."

Turned out, a bug in the SCSI driver (recent OS update... hooray for FOSS! NOT!) "had issues" with this particular make/model drive. ("Great, I've got a dozen of them!").

Roll the OS back to an earlier release (the one I'd used to build the volumes). But, the drives are still mangled.

["Gee, did I violate my own admonition re: backups???"]

Pulled out the (write protected) MO cartridges for that (i.e., THOSE!) disks, rebuilt filesystems and copied 4G of data back onto the first, then the second "cold copies". Back to my three independent copies on two different form of media.

Repair SCSI driver.

Actually, when I recycled the old PC, this external HD was still OK. All the important and frequently accessed data was copied over to a new PC before recycling. So I didn't think it was worth to bother with an extra backup of non-critical, but nice-to-have data remaining only on that drive.

I think you've got the picture exactly. Somewhere I've read that Western Digital drives are somewhat unique with regards to what and how much initial boot-up data is stored in the ROM vs the boot sectors of the drive. So a bad sector map is probably on the ROM. That's why WD data recovery usually requires transplantation of the original ROM chip to any replacement PCB.

Besides, I would not trust those technicians to keep their noses out of the content of recovered drives.

It's now moved into the "no longer have" category! :>

The adage mirrors one that dentists use: "Only brush the teeth you want to KEEP!" I.e., "Only backup the data you want to SAVE!"

They can't. OTOH, unless they're true voyeurs, if they are doing this all day long, 5 days per week, unless you've got something really salacious, I doubt they care!

[OTOH, someone intent on identity theft may exploit *all* "likely candidates"]

I am called on (friends, neighbors, colleagues) to "recover" a machine about once every 3-4 weeks. Spyware, virii, disk failures, munged filesystems, etc. Of course, there is an implicit understanding that I'm going to see things that they probably hadn't intended others to see. And, as there is a PERSONAL relationship, there (i.e., they aren't some "faceless customer"), it can be even more sensitive or potentially embarassing.

I recall having to recover a drive on a friend's wife's computer shortly after she passed away... even describing what I found and what I think was lost was "touchy".

Or, a neighbor's daughter's laptop containing plenty of "party pictures" that I'm *sure* represent activities of which her parents were completely unaware!

Needless to say, trust and professionalism are important qualities! Perhaps moreso in dealings with those we know than "strangers"!

On Tue, 26 May 2015 13:14:55 -0700, cameo Gave us:

snip

It is truly a sad world indeed.

There seems it would be a quite lucrative business in private level data recovery. Most folks simply cry, complain and move on though.

I still have the one drive that ever failed on me, and it was not like old MFM drives, which actually did "hard crash" and thrash platter surfaces, it is simply a spindle motor FET or the like, but they would still want an arm and a leg for fixing it, and my data becomes open-to-all.

I had two old full ht ESDI drives but only one of the drive's cards worked.. They were able to be swapped between them though.

I eventually took one apart.. They had linear head actuators, which would be dog slow by today's standards, but I took some nice pics. Big coils, perm magnets, and linear bearing tracks and gantries. I was amazed.

This is better though... for amazement...

The guy is a bit weird though, mate...

I love that Aussie accent!

"his backup became the only source of data to recover from" is OK; BUT it is most definitely *NOT* the original,which he eXplicitly stated.

Of course it's "the original" -- it's just not necessarily the same as the ORIGINAL original!

Once copy of anything makes it the original.