samsung usb only external HDD data recovery

[Nick]

Yello everyone

i got an external HDD, the PCB is usb only. PC would detect it only for an instant and then lose connection with it, but it still spun

after some curses i manged to find the pinout of the sata to usb chip and i soldered a sata port to the pcb bypassing the USB controller (and removing the 10nf caps)

connecting the hard disk i managed to see the files for what was about 30 secs, the explorer crashed, after the restart the pc would stall and disk managment would crash, at this point the hard disk started clocking a littlle and stopped. removed everything and i tried again after some mins and the thing was the same, see the datas for a little, PCB controller gets hot, little click and crash/stall

getting a new PCB and doing a rom swap will help? Thank you (i still don't have pc3k... )

 

[dukefawks]

Bad heads sound likely. Nothing you can do without special tools. Board swap is waste of time in 99% of cases where drive clicks.

 

[Nick]

Roger that. I did head swaps in the past, let's see if the customer is ok with the price and then I will proceed

 

[dukefawks]

Depends on the size of the drive. The older drives up to 100GB a head swap without adaptation was many times successful. On 500GB/1TB drives you can usually forget about a straight head swap as tolerances are much tighter.
It's an external drive so it was probably dropped and killed a head. Best is to use PC3000 and see if there are still good heads and image the working heads first. Then do a head swap and image the head(s) that were bad.

 

[Nick]

All right then, thank you