Data Recovery Part III - Almost done!

Well - after my last supremely wonderful post that simply pwned the problem, I get home last night to do some more fiddling and take some pictures (below) and find the "fixed" drive no longer accessing. Figures. In typical Adam-fashion, I had over-engineered the solution and it turns out it is much simpler than I thought...

Before I get to that though, here are the steps I took to swap out the PCBs and why I, once again displaying the supreme arrogance expected of me, thought it was a good idea:

1. Check that the two drives are identical by comparing model numbers, if they're not identical, this is likely to fail like Ms. South Carolina answering a question:


2. Now, check the part numbers on the PCBs (since even two identical model number drives can potentially have slightly different components) - not the serial numbers, the part number should be printed on the board itself and not on a sticker:


3. With all numbers matching, you should be able to swap the two circuit boards and expect them to work with each other. With that in mind, unscrew the boards (you'll need to make sure you use the right screwdriver here, the screws are a little soft and these particular ones needed a star-shaped bit of size T8):


4. Screw removed, carefully lift the PCB from one edge and peel slowly off the grey sponge, be careful not to tear the sponge:


5. Note the contacts on the PCB:


6. And the contacts on the Drive housing:


7. Now just switch the two boards and screw back down. Operation complete!

Now - when I first did this, the "broken" drive was recognized and I thought "sweet! now I can image it, restitch and get my data again!" but as I mentioned earlier, when I double checked last night, the drive was once again not recognized. Nice.

However - and here's the clever part - I found that squeezing the drive housing and PCB together (after mounting of course) gave me the access I needed!


And there you have it - a much simpler solution and no real need for removing the PCBs! Especially since I checked the "broken" PCB on the good drive and it worked fine! Take a closer look at the contacts on the PCB - see how they are slightly corroded? I think this is the point of failure on this drive and squeezing them together makes a better connection and allows the drive to access properly. Of course, it could be something completely different like squeezing the boards together makes the computer gods happy... but I prefer my way!

Caveats: The above steps were not necessary for my recovery, but if they will work for you, you should still follow standard procedure and ground yourself and your surface before working on anything relating to computer hardware. If you're even slightly unsure about any of these steps - DON'T DO THEM! I am not an expert, but I've worked with hardware long enough to be able to attempt something like this.

Warnings done - back to the fun stuff next posting! As always, here's your video for the day!

Data Recovery Part II - the son of the return of the revenge of Data Recovery

Okay - quick update on the data recovery ongoing drama... I swapped out the PCB cards mounted on the two hard drives and found that I was able to access the data on the "broken" drive. That should mean that I can take an image of each of the two drives using the Runtime Data RAID Reconstructor software one at a time, then use the same software to stitch them back together into a single drive image. Simple, huh? There appears to be a very low failure rate for this, so I'm pretty confident (arrogance making a strong return to the fore) that we can get all of our data back!

What's amazing to me is that more than a few companies wanted to charge me over $2,000 minimum to do this! Again, I understand that these companies usually work with larger organizations that can afford $2,000 easily, and that they were giving estimates without being able to look at the drives or investigate the issue - but still... The services were starting at $2,000!

So, shopping around for drives, I have decided I need a little more space and am now looking at 750GB or 1TB drives... Samsung is making the top of the list right now, but I'd be happy to use another Western Digital if I can get it at a good price. The best WD I can find right now is $235 or so for 1TB at Bestbuy.com - decent, but still a little high for me right now (see "not made of money" comment in previous post). Samsung appear to have slightly quieter drives (though with 8 case fans on my rig, I'm not sure I'll notice the difference!) while WD seem to be a little faster access (though at less than 1 microsecond difference, I'm not sure a guy on speed-laced espresso would notice).

We'll see - in the meantime, I'm looking at taking the drive out of a removable hard drive I have (one of the WD myBook drives) and using that to hold one of the drive images for reassembly. I'll let you all know how that goes. I'll also take some pictures of the PCB transfer so you can see what I'm talking about...

for now, keeping with tradition, here's a video about computers:

WE'VE LOST EVERYTHING!!!!

Well, maybe not...

So we come back from vacation on Saturday only to discover that my home server had crashed worse than an epileptic driving a robin reliant. I had a RAID 0 array setup for performance (two hard drives, striped data, half goes to one drive, half to the other) into a 500GB combined drive - one of the drives failed thereby losing all of my data. Arrogance flowing freely, I never bothered to back up the data so had a minor break down of "WE LOST EVERYTHING!!!!!" for a few minutes. I come back from vacation and find the system trying to restart but failing with the drives clicking away like an obsessive compulsive with a new clicky-pen.

When I'd finished, I spent some time researching data recovery services and started getting a few quotes on how much it would cost to retrieve the data. First one I get back - $2,000 starting range. SWEET JESUS! Second quote, between $2,500 and $6,000. F*%! ME GENTLY WITH A CHAINSAW! Now, I understand that these companies are used to dealing with corporations with data loss whose data is more valuable than $6,000 but come on...

Ranting aside, I thought about it some more (meaning, I found a dark corner to cry in) and came up with a possible solution. Still need to buy at least one more drive (because you know, I'm made of money), but by taking the PCB from the broken drive and replacing it with the PCB from the working drive, I am able to access the data. A little more online research yields a nice piece of software that lets you image your drives and stitch them back together into a unified drive image that you can then pull the data from. Total cost: LESS THAN 6 F&$@ING GRAND!

Phew! Deep breath...

So, now I need to get a new drive... preferably one around 500GB, so I'm looking around for deals if anyone knows of any...

Vacation was good though! I'll post an entry and pictures shortly. In the meantime, here's a video with an animated baby in it...because... it's Tuesday...

More buff than a car shining commercial

I started weightlifting last weekend - one more attempt at actually doing something good for me! A friend of ours gave us a weight bench with a set of olympic weights and a nice 45 pound bar - then proceeded to kick my ass with a workout the likes of which my body has never known! To be honest the workout was great, it was just another case of the mind being willing but the body... not so much. I've taken it easy for a while though, trying to recover - I'll get into it more seriously when we get back from our trip but I've been reading up on the principles and am looking forward to seeing some results!

The workout my friend showed me was based on one created by Mark Rippetoe in his "Starting Strength" book with only a few variations. With more squats than a Midwestern chili cook-off, the workout focuses on building core-strength and working from that... the idea being that with a strong core and some muscle-mass, you can start working areas individually to become the living Adonis you've always wanted to be. I've been reading a lot at:

Educating myself and trying to figure out what the hell a Skullcrusher is, or a Pendlay Row or HIIT - a translator would be helpful... I'm getting there though, maybe even start posting stats somewhere when I start tracking them!

With all this testosterone flying around, seems like the perfect time for a little Britney Vid:

New Digital Camera

We just picked up a new digital camera after our old one decided it no longer wanted to cooperate with us... We'd been using a Kodak Easy Share z740 for a couple of years and absolutely loved it - a little bulky like the first round rejects from "America's next top model", but took great pictures with minimal effort. Something buggered it up though and the lens stopped extending when we turned it on... Thought at first we had gotten sand inside the mechanism, so I took it apart, cleaned out the sand and reassembled... no dice, still buggered, not happening. It is entirely possible that I didn't reassemble properly, but I'm usually pretty good with these things, so I'm going to be entirely too arrogant and assume that I did everything right as usual and there is something else wrong with the camera!

With our impending trip to San Francisco and my birthday (yay - happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...etc, etc)we decided to take the plunge and get ourselves another mid-range digital camera. We stuck with Kodak because the color chip was one of the best we've seen, and until the z740 stopped working, it was a great little camera. Toodled off to BestBuy and picked up an M833 - much smaller, shinier, lighter and with a couple more megapixels...

It had me at shiney.

We veritably skipped home to play with it and ran into our first problem - the pictures didn't look as good as with the old camera... WTF? finally figured out the ISO was automatically setting too high... forced it into ISO 64 and everything is peachy. I'll let you know more when we get back from the trip, but the birthday pictures turned out pretty good!


This is not the camera we picked... almost though, those flash cubes are so sexy!

Mr. Manners

So, I was talking with my wife the other day (that's right, my wife - sorry ladies) and we got to talking about how rude some people can be... Our discussion actually started on children's increasing disrespect for their parents - for God's sake, they gave you life and you're pissed because they ask you to do something?! Where the hell does that attitude come from?! Your parents don't owe you anything - you owe them everything! Don't get me wrong, there is a point at which parent's requests should be pushed back or denied, but when it is something small and innocuous, why would you bitch about it?

But back to the original topic - when I was at school in an undisclosed foreign land (England is still foreign when you're living in the US!), we were taught several things about how to be polite, most memorably towards women. We, of course, meaning the boys in the class... strange that there was never anything about women being nice to men... Anyway, we were taught things like:

1. If you're walking behind a woman on her own, cross the street so you don't make her nervous


2. Never walk too close to a woman you don't know, you'll make her uncomfortable


3. Always make plenty of noise as you walk so you don't surprise a woman when she realizes you've been following her for the last 3 miles


4. Never look prettier than the woman you're with - it creeps them and others out

Apparently they don't teach those things in school anymore...