I’ve been looking at a friend’s computer over the last few days trying to get data off the hard disk. I tried all sorts of things like Knoppix, but it wouldn’t boot the drive. When I tried to run a Dell Diagnostic on it, it wouldn’t read the drive. I had a disk caddy, but I figured it was dead as the disk that was inside it didn’t work. So tonight I decided to take the drive out as i’ve ordered a new caddy, when I took the case off, I plugged it in out of curiosity to see if my drive had the dreaded click of death, and sure enough it did. So that’s one of MY disks dead. But then I spotted the thing had a SATA socket on it, and it got me thinking….
So….I got the drive out of the Dell box that wasn’t behaving itself. Yanked the SATA cable out, and plugged it in to the tail end of the drive, and into the SATA socket, then using the desktop SATA power cable, I cobbled together a short term solution. (Don’t try this if you’re of a nervous disposition!!!) And the set up looked like this. (see left)
As you can see it’s a somewhat cannibalised solution, the electronics of the drive are pointing at the air, so that it doesn’t short on the computer case. And there’s plenty of room for air to move about. But I was surprised it actually worked!!!
So at the moment, I’m running a scan disk on it to check for bad sectors etc. I’m also hoping to get the data off it as well, and burn that to DVD for my friend in an effort to ensure that they at least have all their stuff.
If I could make one plea, it would be when it’s WITHIN REASON, don’t be scared to experiment with stuff. I’ve got another proper caddy on it’s way. But that’ll stay in its box until I need it now. This solution seems to work fine. I’ll let you know what the outcome was.
