Two Year Old Deskstar P7K500 Burnout

Seabreeze

I have a two year old HP That I stored a lot of information on for my websites. HTML and JavaScript and basicially everything, passwords, Deamweaver CS4, Flash, Fireworks, and Adobe Pro Extended. About two weeks ago I could hear the fans speed up and slow down in the power supply. Seem even with most programs off to conserve the CPU I noticed I always was pegging out at 100 percent. Last week the curser went crazy like my first wife, so I decided to change the power supply with an equal. As soon as I pressed the on switch I heard a pop and the power supply and fans ran but not the hard drive, I need to recover the data on the drive even if I need to purchase the same brand and remove the PC and retrieve. My question is there something of better quality that I can put the data on and not need to worry about losing everything? Does anyone here have any good ideas of how I can resolve this? Hitachi Deskstar Hard Drive P7K500 Quality or a Big Mistake? I have photos of the burned board on bottom but am not allowed to post URL here from Flickr. Bang Head

Thanks, Sea Breeze

**Doctor Feelgood** · Posted: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 10:33:39 Post Subject:

There is nothing saying you need to buy the same brand in order to get back up and running the way you were. Probably not a bad drive (when working right), but you could probably get a Seagate or Western Digital for less now... And they are generally regarded as better.

The recovery part will all depend on how bad that drive is.

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

Have another machine you can put the hard drive in to see if it works? If the drive itself is burnt out, you probably won't be able to recover anything yourself. At least not without some surgery on the drive.

There are places you can send the drive to, where they will pull the data platters out and put them into a good hard drive to pull the data off. Some of them get expensive, but if the data that is on that drive is valuable, might be a good option.

I don't know about that drive, but if you can get the same drive and pull the IO board off it and replace the one on your bad drive, maybe you can get it to work that way. I doubt that's possible though.

knight0334 · Posted: Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:39:00 Post Subject:

Anybody remember the days when IBM owned the Deskstar line of HDDs? ....and there was a reason why they were nicknamed "deathstar" harddrives. lol Wink

Seabreeze

Hellfire · Rated XXX Joined: 05 Aug 2003 Posts: 3473

Yea, your best best is probably to get it to one of the data recovery places. Google it and you'll find lots of them (common problem sadly). They can range anywhere from $50 - $4K. Most will want you to purchase a recovery drive from them at an inflated price.

Seabreeze · Posted: Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:54:44 Post Subject:

Hellfire,
I do not believe I will go as far as the data recovery if I am not able to recover some material. I have begun pulling in WebPages from local and remote servers and rebuilding and backing up. That has been a hard lesson, especially with Adobe CS4; I believe if younger that, taking things in would be a breeze. However, when I was younger writing script was a fantasy and even 10 years ago, computers were primitive compared to today. I may lose another hard drive again but I will not go a day without backing it up. Sometimes hard lessons are the best ones, Thanks, Sea Breeze