When we got a patient drive, we should do some simple check before we connect it to Doctor or DC, those simple check are very useful and make the data recover work more efficiently.
Firstly, Let’s examine the disk by its appearance to find out if it was stroke or disassembled. You may ask the customer for detailed information or check if the screws were twisted off. These physical examination on the patient disk is very important and necessary before connecting to power. Because some physical damages to disks are fatal and unrecoverable:
As shown above, this disk is viewed with intact label and unscrewed appearance.
Next, let’s find out if the PCB was burnt, replaced or some electronic components had been damaged. You may smell it for some judgment. These kinds of malfunctions require suited components exchange or a whole suited PCB replacement. Please note the word ’suited’ here:
As shown above, chips and components are viewed without obvious burnt appearance. So basically we can exclude PCB malfunction.
Disk label is important to judge the disk model and other disk parameters before connecting to some program.
Disk appearance is intact, the disk is not disassembled and no problem with the PCB.
Next, let’s connect the Drive to the computer and the motor is working normally without obvious clicking and with track seeking. However, it cannot be normally detected by the computer:
If connected to other working computers, it is recognized as USB Device in the Device Manager.
Under ‘Computer Management’ of OS, cannot find any relative information about this patient disk:
Follow the above steps, we could deduce that the head and PCB are working well, but maybe some firmware problem, so the next step is to connect it with the doctor and check the firmware problem!
I can’t agree with the subtitle of the first photo in this post. For me it is clear that the label has been punched exactly where the head-screw is. The chance that this drive has been opened is about 100%. So the label is NOT intact and the appearance is certainly NOT unscrewed