If your three drives are identical and one is known good (after saving it’s data) simply unplug the controller board from the good one and use it to see if the other two will boot. Drive controller board removal and attachment is generally fairly modular and straightforward and is usually not that big a deal as long as you proceed carefully and make note of the dis-assembly steps so you can re-assemble.
You can get torx screwdriver sets that will fit a drive from most hard ware mega stores like Home depot etc in the tools section. It’s where I got mine.
Except it sounds like he was running some sort of RAID array, in which case it won’t help to get only one drive running. Someone suggested buying new, identical drives for the controller board. That would work, assuming of course that it’s possible to locate the same model drive.
Well, I suppose I could make an attempt with the (hopefully) remaining drive. If I can get one drive working at a time I should be able to make disk images. I have to find out if the RAID array can be reassembled from images. I had a RAID 5 array with 3 disks, allowing for one failed disk without data loss… Just so happens that I fried two.
I knew I brought it onto myself, so I don’t need that told again. I was naive enough to think that it would be very unlikely for two drives to fail simultaneously. I had a disk failure before, but it was easily fixed by replacing it with a new one, no loss. At the time I bought the array it was not feasible for me to keep a backup copy of 600 Gb, but now some USB disk should be affordable to make regular backups.
Update: I found an ebay seller selling PCB’s for various disks. On their page you get to fill in board number, chip number, model number and some disk code, and you get linked to the exact matching PCB. They have replacement PCB’s for at least one of the fried disks.
And they cost only $40.
I am feeling a little more optimistic now, and this certainly seems to be worth a shot.
The guides seem to cover PCB’s only for Maxtor DiamondMax 9 and 10, as well as Western Digital ATA drives. If you click through their guide they will link you to the ebay item matching your disk specifications.
On their ebay page, there is this info though:
Their webpage that I linked to above mentions this contact info:
I mailed to “info@safeoncomputer.com”. It didn’t take long for them to respond there. I’m not sure why the e-bay page shows a different address, or why they use so many different domains. Their ebay user is safeoncomputer.
I have asked them whether a firmware transfer (from the broken PCB) is necessary, or if I can just order a matching PCB and replace that. I am waiting for an answer to that question. That service costs $20 and should give an identical PCB with the same firmware. I suppose the drive tunes itself during it’s lifetime, so that might be necessary.
Thanks. Probably won’t resolve my issue, but it’s worth a shot. (Click of death on a hard drive that had several images on it. Including the office laptop generic image.)
Thanks, but for now I think I might take the PCB replacement route as it fits my budget best and appears to have high success rate, at least according to the PCB seller.
I gathered courage and tried the third drive with no visible damage, it spins up and is recognized just fine. Phew. That means I need to repair at least one of the fried disks.
Hm. I wonder whether I should buy one or two PCB’s now. I could repair one disk and if it’s successful get a USB disk for backup, and only then repair the third to keep both the RAID array and the new backup. Or I could just order two PCB’s and repair both in one go (+ backup drive. I won’t go without any kind of data insurance henceforth :-D). I wonder how likely success is… The PCB seller did say that repairs of this nature have a high success rate though.
Buying a completely new set of drives costs a bit much for me at the moment.
ETA: I forgot about the option to use the intact PCB that I already have, and then make disk images and assemble the array from them. I would need a lot of storage for that though, 600Gb for the images, and then ~600Gb of space to copy everything to. I could of course discard some junk, but I would still need more than 1Tb for that operation.
Good news that it sounds like you can just swap the controller PCBs on the drives and bring them back to life long enough to rebuild the array.
You can take some mild comfort in knowing you are by far, not the first person to kill drives by getting the power connector backwards. Those Molex things are supposed to be one-way, but if the plug gets rounded off, or mre commonly, the socket gets cracked, you can eaily flop the plug and release the magic smoke.
At least there are some really affordable networkable RAID 1 enclosures on the market now - you can put together a 1TB RAID 1 mirrored volume for about $300.
Whoa. I just checked new disk prices and they seem to have gone down a LOT since I looked last. Over here a 1Tb disk, 7200rpm and 32Mb cache costs only about $120(yeah we have more taxes). That opens up some new possibilities. Let’s say I manage to get two disk images off of my current array (by using the PCB on one drive at a time), that would take 600 Gb out of one 1Tb disk. If I then reconstruct the array out of the images (which I think is possible in software), I could then offload everything onto a second 1Tb drive, after which I set up a RAID 1 mirror with the first.
However, a RAID mirror isn’t exactly the same thing as a backup, so I would still need some kind of backup solution. A little later on it might become tempting to add a third 1 Tb disk and turn it all into a RAID 5 array for double storage capacity. That would make backups more difficult. Hmmm.
It seems trivial to assemble the RAID array out of disk images by using loopback devices. Then I just need some new drives that can fit everything nicely.
No lecturing here, I just wanted to plug Amazon S3 and Jungle Disk as a simple, inexpensive off-site backup solution. I just back up all my critical stuff to S3 (projects, photos, email, etc.) which adds up to just a few GB. It costs me a little over $1/month, backing up weekly.
That’d work for smaller amounts of data, though I probably have a couple hundred gigs of photos at least. Well, I could probably cut that down significantly if I did some serious culling of similar photos and bad photos, but it’s only going to grow over time anyway.
I do need to figure out some affordable backup solution. RAID can’t be trusted in itself, I need something that can be kept separately. A USB drive is probably the easiest and safest solution (no possibility of reversing the power connector :-p).
Mozy.com only costs $5 a month for unlimited storage. I have over 100gb that get backed up nightly on it with no issues. The first backup takes a really long time though (like the better part of a week) but it is automatic and you can still use your computer. It never seems to slow anything down. I had to do a partial restore once and that worked fine as well.
Hm, I’m not sure if they have a Linux client. Anyway, I am not entirely comfortable with sending away all my data to some third party, or is it encrypted locally before sending it over, so that they can’t access it?
Then I just need some new drives that can fit everything nicely.