In the last two weeks I have been digging into 3 laptops in order to perform data recovery in drives that were either faulty or damaged. I don’t know what happened recently but things started breaking around me. I hope it is not me :) and that it will not happen to me (since Apple included Time Machine in Leopard, I have a copy of all my sensitive data on an external drive so my data should be fine).
Since it all started I have recovered data from the following drives:
- one Seagate hard-disk from a MacBook 2,1 (120 Gb, mft. 2007, SATA)
- one Western Digital WDC WD2500YS-01S hard-disk from a server (250 Gb, mft. 2008, SATA)
- one Western Digital hard-disk from a Dell Inspiron 9300 (80Gb, mft. 2006, Parallel-ATA)
- one Hitachi Travelstar HTS541060G9AT00 from a Acer laptop (60Gb, mft. 2006, Parallel-ATA)
The hardest to recover was the last drive, since I did not have any available external enclosure, nor a working laptop with a Parallel-ATA interface. In the end, after more than a week of searching for options, I found a Fujitsu-Siemens laptop that I could use as a host for the faulty drive.
I will not go through the recovery procedure (maybe some other day), but I will post a photo of the drive that I found in the host laptop. While the drive is very easy to reach and to replace, it was the weirdest looking laptop drive I have ever seen as it was covered by an aluminum foil in a manner that for me seems (yet) useless…
I know that cooling is very important, and that lowering the hard-disk temperature by 5 degrees (Celsius) improves the drive’s life, but I have never seen anything similar. The sign on the back of the drive was al I needed: Made in China (like most other computer components :D):
Leave a Reply!