In the Immortal words of Alex Jones, I’m … kinda retarded. I left the cable hooked into the USB-c port on an external drive and shoved it in my backpack and predictably the port broke off damaging the PCB.
It’s not a boot disk, it just holds a bunch of files that I’ve collected over the years. I believe that it’s formatted NTFS.
No worries mate! I’ll just order a matching PCB on EBAY ensuring that the board revision is correct and put a new board on it! I’ve got the appropriate screwdrivers and such. this should be a snap.
I get a new board, snap it on plug the cable in and try to connect to my mac.
It’s a WD external drive, but it won’t mount. crap
I connect it to a windows machine it shows in diskmanager, but won’t initialize. Fatal error it says, double crap
Boot up a Linux distro and run testdisk. It shows that it’s a hard drive, and that it’s 3.7-ish GiB. looks promising. try to find any data on the disk. it’s zeroed out. very concerning. did a deep scan on all 4 TB of data. nothing.
If I can’t recover the data, ill settle for the drive being usable again. What should I do?
Recovery service?
Advanced Linux-fu?
try to swap the bios from the old control board?
give up and drown my failures in beer?
This is kind of maddening, because the drive spins, and I can pull some info about the disk from it, but I can’t seem to read any data from it.
I’m open to input and suggestions and will gladly upload the output of any programs that you may need to help me out. I’m not a Linux grand master like Wendell or some of you on here, but I know a little bit and am always ready to learn.
Thank you in advance.
Iirc, you might need to move a chip from one board to the other.
Check YouTube, but I think there is a firmware chip to be transferred.
It might be easier to desolder the USB socket than the chip, depending on the extent of the damage…
And, I could very well be mis-remembering.
Will DDG it myself too
I’ll upload a picture of the old board later. It’s not pretty.
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Having a search, and it is the Bios chip that I was thinking of.
I never done it myself, and I could be wrong.
But, you got 2 boards, if you got the skills, then the chip might be the way.
If you don’t have a hot air gun, or wick for a soldering iron, maybe check out a spi flash thing.
I would not jump to a flash tool though, because it would only be used once, and other tools might (or might not) be used again.
I also would be hesitant to jump in with a heat gun/tools, till I knew what might (or might not) work.
Pictures of hardware gore might be fun, maybe (spoiler) tags for more mystique?
I guess photorec or similar would be able to detect all the files, and others would be able to rebuild a file table. Hmmm, there may be a software way to do it.
Maybe a search for “recreate/restore file table” might help, but it might also destroy some data maybe, depending on where it writes to
Wait; first things first, this is a SATA HDD in an external enclosure, yes? 2.5" or 3.5"?
Unless this is something weird like a NAS or RAID enclosure, the PCB is not really doing anything relevant. I would suggest connecting to the HDD directly and seeing what Palimpsest (now GNOME Disks) says in its SMART information. If you prefer the command line, smartctl (part of smartmontools) also gives SMART information. On Windows, you can use GSmartControl or CrystalDiskInfo (proprietary).
If you have a desktop, you can likely connect the drive directly to the motherboard via an extra SATA cable, skipping the USB↔SATA conversion that the PCB is doing; that would remove an additional variable from the troubleshooting process.
If it is 2.5" and fits in your laptop, you could swap your main harddrive and live boot a Linux distro with Palimpsest or smartmontools from USB and peek at it that way.
The benefit of connecting directly is that some USB↔SATA chips do not properly convert the ATA commands used to query SMART information. You can read more about that at: USB – smartmontools
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Its been a while so but ill post the exciting conclusion to this tale of stupidity and misfortune.
I ordered a replacement PCB and took the two boards to a repair shop to swap the bios chip and … nothing. Dead as before. So I threw the drive in the trash.
New plan. Build a NAS with high redundancy and offsite backups like i should have done in the first place.
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To fully resolve loose ends, the PCB that you attempted to swap firmware chips on, was this the enclosure’s PCB or the PCB on the underside of the actual hard disk?
For example, here are the three parts of USB external disks, with <interface> representing the type of connexion between them:
cable <USB> enclosure PCB <SATA> disk PCB
-
The enclosure PCB translates between USB and SATA (via SCSI (SAT) if you are curious)
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The disk PCB controls the operation of the magnetic disk itself: controlling spin, head movement and then packaging the data it reads from the disk platter into SATA responses
for SSD enclosures, the disk/drive PCB is instead packaging raw NAND data into SATA or PCIe/NVMe responses
for NVMe SSD enclosures, the enclosure PCB instead translates USB to PCIe, and the drive↔enclosure interface is M.2 rather than SATA
I ask because, if you were only ever connecting through the enclosure PCB, there is a chance that the disk itself was fine, just stuck behind a the enclosure PCB’s malfunctioning USB↔SATA translation.