Molex power connector only on 3 yr old hdd - can I get it working
without the orange wires ? Are the "extra" orange wires only needed for
hotswapping ( as I read in Wikipedia) ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

Friend has 3 yr old Dell Dimension 4600 XP pc - hdd chugs ( sounds like
read errors to me) and starts to boot XP - then " Unmountable boot
error" shortly after XP logo appears. She's graduating in 4 weeks (if we
get this going) and needs to get her thesis off the drive. She said 3
hrs with dell support didn't help - ran diags etc - she hung up when the
guy told her to get a screwdriver and she called me - I have her pc at
my house. The Maxtor HDD has only a 15 pin molex power connector and
none of my pc's have that. I do have I have a 4 pin to15 pin adapter
from an ASUS motherboard installation kit: ( shown here)
http://www.playtool.com/pages/psucon...tml#peripheral

Plan A: didn't work
Use adapter - mount drive in my pc and save here data to CD.
When I do try it in my pc with that connector adapter, my BIOS sees the
drive but not the OS. In xp, I did MANAGE - disk properties - on my pc
nothing at all shows for this drive.

If you scroll up a bit on that link above, you'll see my problem: ( I
think).
The adapter ( for newer drives), only uses +5 and +12v but her molex
connector has orange leads on it too ( 3.3v).
I tried maxtor ( now seagate) and their tech manuals for the drive
reference IDE drives. The only relevant pdf there for the sata is an
install walkthrough ( insert screws, bracket, cable).
Anyone been here ? Are the missing wires my problem ? or wires not
needed ?

I now assume that I'm wasting my time trying it without the proper
connector and I've tried it back in original pc - no better - no worse.
Hopefully it's software problem, BUT since diags fail with read errors,
I doubt it.
-----
Plan B:
I just found out someone I know has a few dell pc's in his office -
maybe I'll get lucky there.
--------
Plan C:
Install an IDE drive in her PC as boot drive - using her xp cd's and
then reinsert this drive.
----
Plan D :
recovery console - chkdsk/r per google search. I don't want to beat up
on her drive in case it really is dying, so trying to avoid this until I
recover her data.
-----
If needed , any advice on getting proper power to her drive in another
of my pc's ? That would make it much easier for me.
------
Thanks,
Bobb

"PeeCee" <abuse@local.host> wrote in message
news:4632ac80@news.henrynet.se...

PeeCee,
re:
"> 1 Just put a new drive in the machine and restore her thesis from her
last
There is no backup - that's the issue.
You're right - so far no go - but I did try.
Using my drive, built new bootable IDE drive in her machine.
Rebooted with both drives in there - mine as boot drive hoping to just
copy her stuff to my drive. XP shows her drive as empty - as in
"unformatted" : properties = RAW.

In 'manage' - Disk mgmt - I can see the 3 dell partititions ( diag, xp,
unused).
Diags do boot off her drive, so the heads can read - and I'd like to
recover her stuff - looks lke the info for the data partition got
wiped - any (free ?) disk utilites recommended ? I haven't used disk
utilities in a long time (DOS) to know what's out there. I only need to
recover a few big files before tossing her drive, and she can probably
give me a clue as to what I'm looking for data.

Yeah I know I'm probably be wasting my time, but she NEEDS the info off
the disk asap to graduate. ( recovery company may have to be her
option). Building / swapping out her drive makes the pc work but that's
irrelevant to her as she has about 6 months of research on her pc - and
her pc only ( I know ! - but she didn't back it up. ) When she's done
with this project/school - she's " tossing the Dell Pc and buying a Mac
" since this is the third time she's had an issue with this pc. When I
got involved the other night she was at the mall gonna buy a mac. She
doesn't have the money to spare - I gave her on of my laptops for now to
use on a daily basis while I try to salvage her work from the disk. I
checked Dell site and her Pc is under warranty until 2008 but Dell's
just gonna swap out her drive - leaving her with no schoolwork. If I
can't get it off there that's what I'll have her do, but I would like to
help her out if I can.

Thanks,
Bobb
==

"PeeCee" <abuse@local.host> wrote in message
news:4632ac80@news.henrynet.se...
< snipped>

- Bobb - wrote:
The drive would probably not spin up if a necessary voltage was missing.

I think the fact that the BIOS returns info, means you are talking
to the controller OK, and chances are the drive would not have
talked to the BIOS, if it was that sick.

Which suggests the reason you cannot see it in XP, is the partition
is buggered. So you need some data recovery software, assuming the
problem is a small one.

Can you attempt a sector by sector copy of the disk ? So you have
a backup of the thing, before going further. I'd want a couple of
spare drives handy, before going further with it. Having a sector
by sector backup means you have something to fall back to, if
the data recovery software damages something. Or if the drive
falls over, on the next POST. (That happened to me once, before
I could do a backup. I decided to power down and leave the recovery
attempt to the next day, and the next powerup killed it.)

I don't hold out much hope for the Seagate/Maxtor web site. Anything
remotely related to tech info, seems to have been removed. Just
warm cuddly marketing info, suitable for lining cat litter boxes.

While the power cable does officially have 3.3, 5, and 12V on it,
I hadn't heard of any product shipping for desktops, that uses
3.3V. The thing is, there are a number of computing products out
there, where the 3.3V is missing from the cable, so when that
transition happens, there should be a good many complaints about it.
I haven't seen any complaints yet. And building adapter cables
will be inconvenient, because no spare PSU cables would have that
on it, on modern supplies.

As an example of a competitor's product, if you scroll to the
bottom of this page, you can see this WD SATA is still using
+5V and +12V:

http://www.westerndigital.com/en/pro...sp?DriveID=137

So now you have two tasks ahead of you. Finding a sector by sector
backup solution (dd in Linux ?). And finding some software, to
try to recover the partition.

Paul

Paul wrote:
Also, I saw this mentioned in another newsgroup:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Paul

" Paul wrote:"
I don't have a linux box ( I should have) and for now looking at
Windows/DOS disk recovery apps. I went to download.com and tried
https://www.binarybiz.com/vlab/buy/?pid=cnet
and ran it. It found 28000 files to recover , so the data IS there, but
need to then PURCHASE the program to recover files. ( they allow 1mb for
free - whoopee)
Check that website - the cost varies by amount of data to recover: 5gb
is $150 and this is a 150gb drive ( not sure exactly how much needed but
even 100 mb is $40), so then looked at
Search and Recover 4 by Iolo Technologies
or
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10
at Compusa for $40 each - that's more like it. Good reviews - I think
that's what I'll have her buy to recover the files to a second disk
drive. Worst case - CompUSA said - for $100 + my DVD's , they will
recover what they can and put it on DVD. No cost if can't recover
anything - that's an option too - and no sending it out - " turn around
in one day".
THEN have her call Dell to replace her bad hdd.

If any other recommendations for disk utility apps, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks again,
Bobb

"Paul" <nospam@needed.com> wrote in message
news:f0taiu$da1$1@aioe.org...

"- Bobb -" <bobb@noemail.123> wrote in message
news:6YWdnTzWwvO7ma_bnZ2dnUVZ_revnZ2d@comcast.com. ..
Bobb

Don't bother with all your 'options' none of them are likely to work.

The symptoms you describe suggests to me that your friends hard drive is
terminal.
As you say the 'chugging' sounds suggest the heads are having problems
locating and reading data off the platter(s)
Mounting the drive in another PC will 'not' improve or force the drive to
perform any better than in its parent machine as the problem appears
internal to the drive not the interface to the PC.

The options open to you and your friend are:

1 Just put a new drive in the machine and restore her thesis from her last
backup.
2 Send the drive to a data recovery specialist (note this can be quite
expensive) then put a new drive in the PC and restore the thesis from the
recovered data.

Note 'do not' run any recovery tools over the drive (eg chkdsk/r) as doing
so will most likely make data recovery difficult if not impossible when you
send the drive to a data recovery specialist.

Best
Paul.

- Bobb - wrote:
That is excellent news.

With regard to Linux, you can have a Linux box, without installing anything.
There are Linux distros, that boot from a CD. I have Knoppix and Ubuntu,
and those are each a 700MB download. I can boot with either CD, and have
an instant Linux environment. The system RAM is used as a "hard drive",
and that is how it works. You can even unplug all your hard drives,
and still have a Linux environment. And if I have 1.5GB of RAM in a machine,
at least Knoppix has an option to copy the entire boot CD into memory
(all 700MB), and you can run without any spinning media at all (pop out
the CD once the boot process finishes).

"dd" is disk dump, and as far as I know, it does a sequential transfer
from one device to another. I'd want the destination device to be a bit
bigger than the source, for obvious reasons. (Sometimes, when two
drives are nominally both, say, "160GB", one can actually be significantly
different in size than the other. Which is why, if you are doing a
sector by sector, it really doesn't pay to buy a spare drive of
exactly the same nominal size. The next size up would be a good
choice, as it guarantees enough room for the copy operation.)

An easier way to do it, might be to find a Windows utility on one of the disk
manufacturer web sites. For example, on Seagate, it would be DiscWizard.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD
http://www.seagate.com/support/discwizard/dw_ug.en.pdf

In section 1.1.3 of the DiscWizard manual, it says:

"If a file system is not supported or is corrupted, Seagate DiscWizard
can copy data using a sector-by-sector approach."

DiscWizard seems mainly to be interested in partitions, and copying
files, and that is not really what I was looking for.

So while I don't see the option immediately in the manual, the claim is
it can copy sector by sector. One reason sector-by-sector is nice,
is the disk head isn't constantly flying all over the place. The head
should smoothly move over the disk surface, as the data is copied over.
If the disk had some mechanical issues, that is about as gentle as it
gets.

As far as data recovery tools go, I've never had the opportunity to
try them. I've had two disk failures here, and no chance to get at
the data. (One disk failed with a mighty "sproing" sound, which
was the head assembly getting caught in something. Some disks
have the misfortune to use landing ramps and head locks.)

As I mentioned in the other post, I saw this just recently.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

But the thing is, my philosophy is to backup first, and then try
to recover. This is based on a bad experience I had eons ago. I
had a floppy, back when floppies had duplicate directories. My
proprietary computer (designed by my group) had a recovery utility,
that was supposed to copy the good directory info, over top of the
bad directory info, in the event that one of the directories got
corrupted. I didn't attempt to copy the floppy first, and just used
the recovery utility (because it sounded so simple and foolproof).
It copied the bad directory info, over top of the good directory,
all automatically, leaving me with nothing. From that, I learned

"backup first, recover second"

I wish I could help on picking a recovery utility, but the
companies who make them, have flooded every search engine
with advertising. Making it hard to find any web page where
someone has compared them in a meaningful way. I know if I had
a bad disk right now, I would not look forward to the
data recovery software selection process. While I like the
concept of the "blackmail" utility ( $$$ per megabyte ),
you'll always be tempted to keep looking until you
can find one that will do the job for free :-)

You can try asking over on comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage ,
as long as the participants are in a good mood, and don't
go on one of their flame fests. Some data recovery firms
actually troll the newsgroups, so you may get a recommendation
out of the blue. With the Google feature to alert a person
when certain keywords are used, it is easy for someone to
be on the lookout for customers.

Paul

Paul,

Thanks very much for the helpful advice: I'm downloading Knoppix now.
ftp://csociety-ftp.ecn.purdue.edu/pub/knoppix/
I'll have to spend a lot of time looking through " help" on Wiki to get
to know the valid commands and how to use each before I can use it
properly, but that IS something I should have learned by now.

I hadn't thought of using the hard disk's install floppy/CD routine: I
didn't realize that they'd do a sector copy ( honestly I haven't used
one since the BIOS was able to see drives larger than (was it ? ) 528mb
barrier)
Well, one way or another, hopefully I'll have gotten her data off there
by tomorrow night.

Thanks again.
Bobb




"Paul" <nospam@needed.com> wrote in message
news:f10vij$fjm$1@aioe.org...

BTW, she bought " Iolo Search & Recover 4.0 " and it found 400 deleted
pictures/wav files / html files and that's it. When I clicked
specifically on just the drive letter to restore, it replied:
" Partition is unformatted . Would you like to format?"
Great.

For others out there, I then tried
http://www.data-recovery-software.net/ demo and it found about half the
drive intact and shows me an Explorer type window with the good stuff up
top and about 50 folders that are trashed. The program is only 5mb -
looks good, but I gotta check if it needs a second drive to copy to
also. And if I see the filename/folder , does that mean the it has
already checked file integrity and it is OK ? Don't wanna buy it to
find out that 'seeing it means only that it has the POTENTIAL to be
recovered' . will look into it further .. in the morning

Thanks again.




"- Bobb -" <bobb@noemail.123> wrote in message
news:T66dnVtwFNwxBqnbnZ2dnUVZ_jadnZ2d@comcast.com. ..

I've been at it a long time - trying lots of apps ( free and
storebought) and THE (free) program that worked for me is:
http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html

I tried a LOT and several of them look the same.( By that I mean that
'someone' came up with a basic program and others merely added a few
icons - but obviously same app - see
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/manual.htm for example )
So when I saw this one I thought I'd have same outcome , or only be
able to recover a 16kb file ( like a few others), but this one allowed
me to see/get all of the files needed. Size didn't matter.
Their download page showed " NTFS - incomplete" BUT it got all of her
school / music/pictures/office files etc off the NTFS drive just fine.

It took a while and was tedious to keep clicking on the
"ABORT or RETRY or CANCEL " choice for every read error, BUT eventually
I got through it and then saw the directory structure for " Documents
and Settings ...". I found that I couldn't select the entire user
folder - as it overwhelmed the app ( memory) and bugchecked/rebooted PC.
So I ran it again - had to get rhru the clicking again and then selected
folders - chose the save path and did it a few folders or subfolders at
a time and it's going OK. Prior to seeing the directory structure, I got
a LOT of errors elsewhere on the drive. I got several errors during the
music recovery ( depending upon physical part of disk ) , but most music
files coming out OK.

Thanks for the input



"- Bobb -" <bobb@noemail.123> wrote in message
news:8fidnQ5_kaXD-ajbnZ2dnUVZ_segnZ2d@comcast.com...

- Bobb - wrote:
That is amazingly good luck for a freeware app. I hope your friend appreciates
the effort you've put into this. Have you picked out a backup application
for her yet :-) ?

Paul