Help with invisible SATA HDD please.

GregoryWhitehead

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Jun 8, 2011
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Hello,

First time poster looking for a bit of advice.

My C: drive has died. The plastic housing has sheared off the serial data connnector. For a time all I needed to do was 'jiggle' it and it would show up in BIOS and then boot normally. Increasingly jiggling was quite unreliable until about two months ago no amount of jiggling would work.

You guessed it...ALL my important docs are on there and they aren't backed up! I'm in so much trouble as my partner has suggested I clone the C: to one of the old drives I've got knocking around (I used to do this but have gotten really, really lazy) but I never did it.

I managed to find a near identical drive (same s/n, model etc) to try and swop the controller board over. The donor drive was about 2 weeks apart from the C: but no joy. I was quite surprised I managed to get such a fit in drives and was sure it would work.

Turns out that someone I had look at the C: reckons one of the 7 pins is loose; in fact it's about to fall out.

SO: does anyone think I should see about soldering the pin back? Maybe even buy a replacement serial data connnector? Has anyone here done this before? Would someone be able to do it for me for a small price?

I think the controller board swop didn't work as the board is unique to this drive.

I'd rather not shell out the £600 quid these recovery firms are asking if it's such a simple fix.

Oh, and the drive whirrs fine and has never been dropped. I don't think it's anything major.

I just want BIOS to pick the drive up so I can clone the whole OS etc to the new donor drive. I've even contacted WD and they will do an RMA on the C: but I don't want to do that until I get the data off.

Sorry for the length of post but I hoped giving you all the details would help. I posted a similar cry for help on another forum but didn't get too much help (apart from one guy who was amazing but couldn't quite get it working)...

Looking forward to your thoughts.
 
The safest way out is to clone the drive. And in order to do that, you must first connect the drive to the motherboard. So let's concentrate on that.

Carefully attach a cable to the end that is broken, and by some means using adhesive tape, try to position it such that it does make contact. Use some super glue if necessary. Once it is temporarily taped, do the cloning. After that kiss the old drive goodbye. (Forget about repairing pins).
 

GregoryWhitehead

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Jun 8, 2011
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Thanks for that Ubrales. That's exactly what I want to do. But (presumably due to the loose pin) I cannot get BIOS to recognise the drive.

I don't think it's a search area problem more that I reckon the loose pin is a very important one (apparently not all 7 pins are vital). Hence why everything I've tried - I even bought one of those all-in-one moulded power and data connectors - doesn't seem to have worked thus far.

I'm highly confident that soldering the pin should work but have never done this before. Then I can clone to the donor and either ditch or RMA the C: drive.
 

If you are adept with soldering, use a 0.5mm or a 0.75mm dia. rosin core solder wire along with a 25 watt (40 watt also will work) fine tip soldering iron.

Watch some of the 'repair motherboards' videos on YouTube.