Hard Drive Resurrection - An Easter Story


Today one of the faculty members in our department had a hard drive failure on a PC in his lab so I had to go check it out. He had purchased two Dell Studio desktop systems a little over a year ago, and the first one had a hard drive failure a few weeks ago, and now the second one did as well. I find it amazing how often these drives die just a few months after their warranties expire. Sure enough, the PC BIOS did not even recognize the drive was there, so I yanked it out (a Western Digital WD5000AAKS from November 2009) to check it with my trusty $12 USB SATA/IDE hard drive adapter I had purchased from Geeks.com. The WD drive gave three little spinning noises (no clicks) and then just sat there. My Ubuntu Linux system created a drive device in /dev but nothing for any partitions (i.e. /dev/sde but no /dev/sde1 or /dev/sde2.) I tried running fdisk on /dev/sde and it did not find anything and decided the 500 GB drive was really a 2GB drive. That is the same problem the drive on the first system had, but it had not made the three spinning noises.

Since I still had the older dead drive lying around, I was curious if perhaps I could swap the PCB's on the two drives and possibly get one working drive out of the two. So I put the PCB from the drive that died a few weeks ago on the drive that just died and reattached it to my Linux system via my USB adapter. It was not detected. Then I put the PCB from the recent death on the older dead drive and what do you know... it worked! Just for kicks I put the original PCB back on the drive that died a few weeks ago, and that worked as well. So the drive that had died a few weeks ago (and had not been recognized as a SATA device on the PC back then) was now detectable on my USB/SATA adapter. I put that drive back in the PC in the lab and it booted up in Windows 7 just fine. Since both those systems were identical Dell Studio desktops the drivers all worked and it was as happy as a clam. So that is my geeky Easter resurrection story, a story of rebirth and tech happiness from despair and destruction. Since that drive had died a few weeks ago, the lab members also learned about the power of backups and both those systems had been backed up so no data was lost either (I had purchased some external USB drives for them for backup after the first failure!) So all is well with the computers in that lab...

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