On 11/29/2018 17:02, P. J. Alling wrote:
The third drive might just be suffering from a bad controller board. The two
that died in the machine probably have scrambled information in the boot sector,
it's really bad luck when that happens, if they respond to the OS at all there
are utilities that can analyze the drive and maybe rewrite that sector so the
data is accessible, I haven't had much luck with those methods lately.
FDISK /MBR worked well back in DOS days, but I haven't tried it with anything
after Windoze95 (which was still really a DOS shell). Don't know what the
equivalent command would be for Mac or Apple.
If the drives are old enough, and they are all the same model with the same
firmware, you may be able to take the controller board from one of the drives in
your machine, and perform a transplant. Needless to say this will void the
hardware warranty. Also it may make things worse, though how that could be I
don't know.
There are YouTube videos that give detailed instructions on how to do both. I'd
give some but as I've said, I haven't had a lot of luck recovering drives lately...
For older IDE and SATA drives there are vendors who sell refurbished controller
boards. They're not that expensive. Twenty-five to Fifty dollars when I looked
into it. In today's world that's chicken feed.
The YouTube videos can also give you information about whether your drive's
symptoms suggest it would be one where replacing the controller board would work.
I wouldn't trust a drive using one of those boards for the long haul, but if I
had a dead drive that I needed to recover DATA from I'd give it a try. If it
works, your data is worth a lot more than the controller costs and if it fails
you're no worse off than you were to begin with.
I've been fortunate so far that all the drives I've had fail were duplicated, so
none of my critical data was lost. I do need to get busy and find a new OFF-SITE
backup scheme.
On 11/29/2018 4:09 PM, mike wilson wrote:
On 29 November 2018 at 20:43 John <jsessoms...@nc.rr.com> wrote:
On 11/29/2018 13:32, mike wilson wrote:
I've had three hard drives on the go for a while. Two at home and one off
site. The off site one croaked so I had a replacement to format. Before
that kicked off, I added some files to one of the other drives and then
started backing that up to the other. At which point we had one of those
micro disruptions, where all the lights flicker - and computers reboot. Now
neither of the drives is responsive - about four years' work. Did I mention
I hate digital photography?
Ouchies! I hope the third drive has the images duplicated & you can recover.
Third drive was already dead.
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Religion - Answers we must never question.
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