2.5" IDE HDD with broken pin- repairable?

[jraschke11]

Hello Community,

I have an old 2.5" notebook IDE HDD with a broken pin. Does anyone know if it is repairable or usable? I didn't have my camera with me to take a picture of the actual pin, but there is just a little tiny flash of copper visible right even with the plastic, so nothing is really sticking up.

The pin is number 18. It is labeled at Data 15 from what I can find. I am not very savvy on this hardware, so if anyone can help, it would be great!

Thank you.

 

[Snipergod87]

i guess it would be possible if you managed to soder on a new pin, other than that no.

 

[cadder]

It can probably be repaired if your goal is to get data off of it. It would be too much trouble to repair it just to use it, because new drives are so inexpensive. You could try getting another identical connector to put on it, or you could jumper a small wire over this point and leave the cable always connected to the drive. Where there's a will there's a way. I remember years ago my cousin had one of those "Simon" games. He dropped it and that cracked the internal circuit board. I took it apart and followed the traces that crossed the crack. I soldered wires on to jumper across the crack and made the game work again.

I've heard that the data recovery companies will go so far as to swap on the circuit board from an identical drive so they can access the data.

 

[jraschke11]

Here is the fix that I used, and it worked perfectly it seems.

http://arem.us/stuff/hdd/

Stuck a sewing needle in to the female end and cut the end of it. Put a really small square of aluminum foil folded several times to help the needle contact the stub of pin that was sticking up. Windows now recognizes is as the 100 GB HDD that it should be.