Did I fry my hard drive?

Just purchased a 2 TB hard drive from Staples
Staples External drive

The Hard drive in it is a Seagate Barracuda Green drive which others mentioned is 7200RPM, 64MB Cache, 6GB/s SATA III.

Last night after transferring 1 GB of wedding and childrens pictures on it ( and deleting the old drives of course) I plugged in the laptops power plug into it. Within 15 seconds I smelt a burning smell and immediately unplugged it, but by then the drive was unusable.

I was hoping I fried the seagate enclosure and the hard drive survived so to test it, I removed the hard disk, and put it in (L=this SATA enclosure]http://www.directron.com/etcsnsu2bk.html[/L] which I had 3 years ago, but it did not even turn on.

My questions are:
1. Am I using the correct enclosure?
2. Is the hard drive also fried? Can it be recovered?

Please advise, I am about to die. It includes both my sons birth and last 8 years of photographs. I was working on rearranging the second back up and instead lost all.

Thank you.

1) yes

2) it sounds like it is fried, yes. Recovery is probably possible, but may well need to be sent to a clean room which is very expensive.

Some people have had luck replacing the electronics (that you can see on the outside) on a drive, but there's no way to know if that would work. The bad power could have fried the motor or some other internal parts.

Harsh lesson, but don't forget it. Never, ever, keep important things in just one place.

That is a damn good point.

Oh, if that's all you did you should be in good shape! There are many free programs you can use to recover deleted files. Just remember, no matter what you do, DO NOT WRITE anything to those drives. Read only!

Recuva is a popular one and it is free.

MOZZY said:   minidrag said:   Oh, if that's all you did you should be in good shape! There are many free programs you can use to recover deleted files. Just remember, no matter what you do, DO NOT WRITE anything to those drives. Read only!

Recuva is a popular one and it is free.

Thanks, using Recuva I could see some of the pictures on the old external drive. I will buy a new external drive today and then start transferring photos to the new external drive.

Can I also use Recuva to recover images from a laptop from which I cut pasted the photographs. I emptied the recycle bin in the laptop though.Emptying the recycle bin shouldn't matter (other than making it not completely trivial...) unless you did a "secure erase" sort of thing. You do want to STOP using the laptop though until you've recovered files. Either take the hard drive out and use it in another computer, or find a way to boot the laptop off a different drive. Also, I'm not really familiar with Recuva but from a quick look it looks like an "undelete" type of software. If that doesn't find everything you need, you also want to try PhotoRec which searches for file-type signatures throughout the drive without relying on the filesystem. The UI is a bit more "advanced" (text-based), but the webpage gives you a pretty decent guide to using it. Perhaps someone else knows of a GUI to PhotoRec or some other friendlier signature-based recovery software.

I thought the laptop was another issue - another PC that files had been removed from that OP wants to get back. Either way, yes, you can use this type of program on it. Recuva was just the first one that occurred to me. There are others and many are more in depth with many more options. Recuva is simple and free, so a good place to start.

lordoffire said:   how did you mistake a laptop cord for an adapter cord? how was it able to fit? (laptop plug should have been larger)
They come in all sizes. It's pretty easy to get them mixed up, especially if you have a lot of different cords.

I suspect the power supply of the enclosure fed too much voltage to the internal drive. If you're lucky, the only damage was to a diode designed to protect against such damage (TVS -- Transient Voltage Supressor) and to a fuse connected to it, and replacing those components will restore normal operation. Franc Zabkar (Fzabkar) has posted information about this at several places, including here. If you're not so lucky, the board has to be replaced with one from an identical internal drive, and OnePCBsolution has them. However the tiny BIOS chip has to be transplanted from the original board because it contains information to tune the heads and servo, and that company offers to do that for an extra $50. I believe it's easy to remove the circuit board with a torx driver, but watch out for any ribbon cable going to the motor. Not all drives use such a cable, but if yours does, unplug it from the circuit board (connector may have a hood that has to be slid back, pried up, or there may be a couple of plastic pins that have to be pulled out). If you're not experienced at soldering or unsoldering and don't have a friend who is, practice on some junk circuit boards first. You'll probably need a 40W soldering iron. YouTube has many instructional videos about soldering. To play it really safe, consider using Chip Quik (also has YouTube instruction).

I test a drive for about a week before putting any important data on it, and when I transfer a lot of files I just do a copy, then verify everything before I erase the originals.

minidrag said:   lordoffire said:   how did you mistake a laptop cord for an adapter cord? how was it able to fit? (laptop plug should have been larger)
They come in all sizes. It's pretty easy to get them mixed up, especially if you have a lot of different cords.
all of my computer cords are noticeably thicker than regular adapter cords...

and certainly, if the data was that important, there should have been more than one copy....

Thank you everyone for your advise and support.

Let me clarify the situation. I had two external drives 320 and 600 GB. Documents, letters and accounts, were all backed up to dropbox. Old photographs (approx 250 GB) was backed up on both the hard drives. However there were photographs on the 600 GB which were not backed up, and approx 60 GB on my laptop. Lots of duplication across all drives.

I am moving next week to a different city and was organising my stuff. Bought this 2TB drive with a plan to consolidate everything here and then back up the photographs on the 600 GB. Since there were a lot of duplicates I used the cut paste function instead of copy paste. Emptied the two external hard drives, and the laptop onto the new drive. This took a day and a half to complete.

I emptied the recycle bin on my laptop and then shut down the laptop and hard drives so it cools down a bit. At midnight yesterday, I planned to now copy the images back onto the 600GB drive. The plugs on the power cord of this Seagate drive looks just like my laptop plug. Turned on the laptop and plugged the wrong wires in.

I am married, two kids, full time job, graduating today , moving next week, lots happening, so the only time to myself is at night when everyone is sleeping. Not trying to write a sob story to get sympathy, I made a big mistake. Also thought I was a very responsible person, and well organised, and never believed this could happen to me. Well now I know.

So to summarise, I lost data approx 900 GB from 2 external hard drives. Also lost approx 100 GB from my laptop. I bought a new WD 2 TB hard drive from Target today and am recovering the photos from one of the external drives using Recuva on my office desktop.

Stopped using my laptop (unfortunately I did work on it and installed recuva on it too). Will have to get an external case to recover the laptop hard drive tomorrow.

I also posted this on SD and people mentioned it may be a "TVS protection diode" which is burnt. Dont mind paying someone 200-300 bucks to see if they can replace it just to make sure I dont loose any photographs.

Thanks again for all your advise. Just one request, I know I made a mistake and will back up stuff more, but as Ellory mentioned please keep this conversation focussed on data recovery.

Thank you.

ellory said:   marsilies said:   One thing that nobody's mentioned yet is that you should never have only one copy of data you want to keep. Drives fail all the time, and it's never a sure thing that they can be recovered (or that you can afford to have it recovered if it needs a professional).
No one as mentioned it, because we are focussed on data recovery. Let's get through this and then talk about data protectionYes, I did mention it. First reply to OP, last sentence. So there

MOZZY said:   Stopped using my laptop (unfortunately I did work on it and installed recuva on it too). Will have to get an external case to recover the laptop hard drive tomorrow.
You don't necessarily have to buy an external enclosure for the laptop drive. As psm321 mentioned, you can boot off another drive, like the optical drive or possibly a USB flash drive, and then recover the files on the laptop internal drive to your new external.

Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) includes PhotoRec (which, despite its name, can recover more than just photos):
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win) has Recuva and other recovery programs:
http://www.ubcd4win.com/

You're going to want to recover from as many sources as you can, and possibly even run multiple recovery programs if you don't think one caught everything on a drive. after you've recovered everything you can and have backed it up, you'll need to go through and root out duplicates. I found this tool very helpful for finding duplicate files:
http://doubles.sourceforge.net/

You may also want to use a duplicate image finder tool. These will locate files that have the same image, even if the files aren't indentical (different resolution, compression, image type, etc). I've used VisiPics in the past for this:
http://www.guidingtech.com/3847/visipics-duplicate-image-finder/

I wouldn't write anything to to drive at all.

UBCD for Windows supports USB drives. Maybe you should try that instead of UBCD for DOS?

MOZZY said:   My hard drive had two partitions, the OS on C and all files on D. However I did have some images on C too. Should I recover data of one partition on the other, then do vice versa, or will that make it difficult to recover data?
You should never write to a partition that you still need to recover data from, since the new data being written could overwrite the data you want to recover.

PhotoRec is part of Parted Magic on the UBCD, and Parted Magic is a Linux Live CD, which should be able to see external drives. Make sure the external drive is mounted before trying to write to it from PhotoRec.

UBCD4Win is another option too.

MOZZY said:   Thanks, tried doing that yesterday, but my computer is Windows 7 Home and the instructions say to use a XP SP1 or SP2 disk (which I dont have either)

How to make UBCD Win
You can build it on Windows 7, but you do need an XP source. An original XP disc could be upgraded to XP SP2 via slipstreaming. I also think XP SP3 will work, although the builder complains about it.

There are ways to make a "Live CD" of Windows 7, but I can't find any package that makes one with data rescue tools already included.

minidrag said:   
You could always order one for $3.95.

http://www.burrowssolutions.com/index.php?main_page=product_info...
That's not a bootable copy, it's just a collection of files freely available on the net. It's illegal to distribute a copy of XP without a license. They include the SP3 installer for XP, which can be downloaded for free online. but not XP itself.

Just as Advised above it was the poser supply. Over on SD i was told my drive and data was safe but the board was fried. Advised me to do the stuff below

"I think removing and replacing the circuit board is easy for that Seagate because there's no ribbon cable.  Just get the correct size Torx bit screwdriver, and take precautions against static electricity (no shoes, no socks, no long sleeves, and put everything on a big sheet of anti-static pink foam wrap or anti-static pink bubble wrap, keeping in mind that not all the pink stuff is anti-static.  If you don't have any such material, work on a bare metal cookie sheet or piece of aluminum foil.

[url]http://www.OnePCBsolution.com[/url] sells replacement circuit boards, but if you change the board you should (or must) transplant the original BIOS chip to the new board, and that company will do that for an extra $50.  The total will be roughly $100."

Contacted OnePCB on the link above and mailed them
my hard disk board. They cloned the board and sent me both my board and a new one back. Once I put the new board on, I could access all my files. This was incredibly fabulous. 
It cost me just 50 bucks and took abt 2 weeks turn around time. Learnt my lesson, back my data on three drives now. 

Thanks everyone for your help during this extremely stressful time. 

larrymoencurly said:   I suspect the power supply of the enclosure fed too much voltage to the internal drive. If you're lucky, the only damage was to a diode designed to protect against such damage (TVS -- Transient Voltage Supressor) and to a fuse connected to it, and replacing those components will restore normal operation. Franc Zabkar (Fzabkar) has posted information about this at several places, including here. If you're not so lucky, the board has to be replaced with one from an identical internal drive, and OnePCBsolution has them. However the tiny BIOS chip has to be transplanted from the original board because it contains information to tune the heads and servo, and that company offers to do that for an extra $50. I believe it's easy to remove the circuit board with a torx driver, but watch out for any ribbon cable going to the motor. Not all drives use such a cable, but if yours does, unplug it from the circuit board (connector may have a hood that has to be slid back, pried up, or there may be a couple of plastic pins that have to be pulled out). If you're not experienced at soldering or unsoldering and don't have a friend who is, practice on some junk circuit boards first. You'll probably need a 40W soldering iron. YouTube has many instructional videos about soldering. To play it really safe, consider using Chip Quik (also has YouTube instruction).

I test a drive for about a week before putting any important data on it, and when I transfer a lot of files I just do a copy, then verify everything before I erase the originals.

Thanks.

As a precaution, I've been backing up all my (full-size) pictures to Picasa. Just in case my external back-up gets fried, or my computer stolen.
You might want to do that too.

Good info on the circuit board hd; I didn't know that could be done.

minidrag said:   lordoffire said:   how did you mistake a laptop cord for an adapter cord? how was it able to fit? (laptop plug should have been larger)They come in all sizes. It's pretty easy to get them mixed up, especially if you have a lot of different cords.To OP,

~30+ years ago, IIRC , my late aunt (who, along with my late uncle, more than likely instilled the FRUGALITY in me that seems to now be a part of my core being i.e. I visit FW & SD DAILY!!! ), gave me several 'opened / used' boxes of different colored Avery 3/4" Diameter Self-Adhesive Unprinted Labels (the lime green box that I'm looking at now is "T-5468, ©1972 AVERY LABEL CO."). Just a note - original quantity was 1000 labels per box! AFAICR, my uncle was ALWAYS the "Lovable" Superintendent at some ~70+ unit apartment building and thus tenants were ALWAYS giving him things (The Lionel Trains were *GREAT*!!! ). Whenever I would visit, my aunt would say "Could you use this?". And so my life as a PACKRAT began...

***EVERY SINGLE TIME*** I get a device with a new USUALLY UNLABELED GENERIC Wallwart (I'm also OCD ), I write the device's name on a BRIGHT LIME GREEN label, and stick it on the wallwart. *SO MANY* imported / inexpensive / *CHEAP* devices use the same looking wallwart that I don't want to take the chance of incorrect voltage and/or polarity. When something DIES, I use RED to note the DATE and the PROBLEM. Several years ago, when I bought ~10 "AS-IS / LOCAL PICK-UP" HPLJ II and III printers (for ~$1-10), I used PINK to label the parts I took off with the last 4 digits of the serial number. Handy little labels they turned out to be! {ThumbsUp}

After the fact, but, IMHO, still good advice!

Good Luck with your file recovery!