Question : Problem: SATA Drive Not Recognized - bad PCB

Hey all.

Last week I went to get a new SATA drive (hitachi 250gb SATA) to RAID stripe it with my current hitachi SATA 160gb.  Unplugged the 160, plugged in the 250gb, had some issues with getting Windows installed on the new drive (didn't have the raid drivers, or a floppy drive - had to go buy one), but I got it working with Windows installed and SATA and RAID drivers properly installed.  I did not, however, at this time, have RAID enabled in the BIOS. (fyi: it's an onboard Intel RAID controller on an MSI 865 Neo2 PFISR)  I just wanted to plug in the 160gb to the secondary SATA connector on the board to see if it was recognized and if I hadn't messed up anything.  Well, apparently I did.

The 160gb drive wouldn't recognize in the BIOS no matter what I did.  I tried everything.  Unplugging the new drive, setting up my computer EXACTLY how it was before the 160gb stopped being recognized - nothing worked.  Even wiped the BIOS clean, reset it to factory firmware BIOS version and everything.

Read some forums, asked some friends who're more hardware-savvy than I am, and they said the drive simply went bad. Fair enough. Annoying, but a valid answer.  The drive DOES spin up, and doesn't make funny noises like it's being scratched or the plates are out of alignment.  The data is very very likely intact.  The computer just can't see the drive.  The PCB just went bad.

The solution?  Get the EXACT same drive from Hitachi with the same firmware, etc, and exchange the PCBs on the drives to get my data off the broken 160gb drive.  This sounds annoying.  The drive is out of production.  Finding the exact drive would be near impossible.  And even if I got one, I'd be scared to do it myself because I'm not very hardware-savvy and quite clumsy. ;)

Just got a mail from a friend saying I should get a an SATA hard drive enclosure, hook up the cable from the drive to the connector in the enclosure, then connect the enclosure to a power socket and the firewire port on my box and boot up the machine and the bad drive should be seen.  It seems viable to me... but I'm no hardware pro.  I have no idea how these things work.  

Would something like this be worth trying?  Not sure if the only part of the PCB that's bad is the part where it's detected in the BIOS or what.  It totally could work, I think.    He also said I should try to hook it up to a mac running 10.3 or 10.4 as they detect drives differently and try to pull data off that way.  We have a mac in the house... so it could be done.

What does everyone think?  Would it be worth going out and spending the 80 bucks on an enclosure and giving it a shot?  Or is my friend just completely insane?

I've called around to data recovery shops and have gotten quotes from $800 all the way up to $2300 to recover my data, which I followed with a few obsceneties mentioning highway robbery, etc. :p

By the way, a few things to end it.  Through this whole process, RAID was not turned on in the BIOS at all, if that makes a difference.  The drive just simply went bad at the exact same time I installed a new one (the old one was unplugged when I installed the new one, so the PSU didn't freak out and fry the old one).  It's also not a power supply issue.  I have plenty of juice to run both drives plus my DVD drive and all my other hardware.  I originally tried disconnecting everything I could that needed power (excluding the obvious) and just plugging in the 160gb to make sure it wasn't a power messup.  It's also not my motherboard.  Had a friend bring his computer over and it won't detect there either.

Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to cover all bases!  Thanks!

I'd just ditch the drive, but it has 10 years worth of collected music and professional digital photography on it and I simply cannot afford to lose it.

Answer : Problem: SATA Drive Not Recognized - bad PCB

Separate drives aren't a bad thing -- but if you really just want one, you can make the 2nd drive a "dynamic drive" and assign it as a folder on your primary drive (i.e. "C:\Extra Space" could actually be another disk drive -- or even several additional drives !!).

On the other hand, since you've confirmed your 160gb drive is bad; you could buy another 250gb drive and install those as a RAID-0 stripe and you'd get 500gb of space AND notably better performance.   Just be aware that if ONE drive fails in a RAID-0 stripe you lose ALL of your data on the entire striped array.   This sounds worse than it is -- if you had a big 500gb drive and it failed the same thing would happen :-)
... and the striped array gives you much better performance.   And your onboard Intel RAID controller will do this just fine.

But as for recovering your data, I'd do NOTHING else with that drive and send it off to Gillware.   The more you "play" with it; the less likely the data can be successfully recovered.   Gillware will cost you a few hundred dollars ($378.99 is their current fee), but ONLY if they recover your data :-)