I had a power spike zapped my PS, mobo, both harddrives, CD drive and CD
writer. The drives are all IDE and the mobo was an ASUS Slot 1. The
CPU and memory survived. When I hook either of the harddrives to
another mobo, they do not spin up nor is the mobo able to boot.
Removing drive from ribbon cable does allow boot from CD (not the dead
one). Do I have any chance of getting data off these drives? Will one
of those harddrive data reclaim services work?

Thanks.

Bryon Lape <aintnoway (AT) blahblahblah (DOT) com> wrote in
message news:dkjlk2-81s.ln1 (AT) gandalf (DOT) grey-net.com...

You were warned about that grave dancing...

Doesnt matter much, well past their useby date now.

Likely they are slugging the 12V rail badly enough
that the power supply shuts down immediately.

Yes, the drives may well be old enough that you can swap the logic
card with a known good identical model drive and get the data back.

Yes, but you'd better be sitting down when they tell you the price.

Quite viable for a business, but not usually for a personal
desktop system and since its so old, its likely you're a pov.

Rod Speed wrote:

The PS doesn't shutdown on boot. The mobo just sits in POST waiting for
the second coming.

Bryon Lape <aintnoway (AT) blahblahblah (DOT) com> wrote in
message news:c9ulk2-kd4.ln1 (AT) gandalf (DOT) grey-net.com...
Its more likely that the spike zapped the PS, or it just died,
and thats what killed most of what was powered from it.

How long did you wait ? Some motherboards do take a
surprisingly long time to decide that no viable hard drives are
present, but it should eventually decide that there arent any and
attempt to boot off the other drives listed in the boot sequence.

Maybe the dead drive is slugging the 12V rail bad enough
that it cant make any sense of the response its getting
from the other drives like the optical drives or something.

Power spike THAT bad will have crashed your drive
head bigtime. I suspect the recording surface is ruined
too.

johns

johns wrote:
Why would you conclude that a power spike must necessarily cause a head crash?

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage David Maynard <nospam (AT) private (DOT) net> wrote:
I don't see any reason for that either. Semiconductor damage is likely,
but the heads flat on an air-cushion generated by the spindle spinning.
To channel enough energy to the spindle to change the speed significantly
would need a very short burst with very high enery and that would likely
just vapozise the motor controller instead. The only option for actual
damage to the mechanics I see is if the pre-amplifiers near the heads are
purnt or vaporsed. I don't think that it is possible to do that, since
they are pritected by voltage regulators and filters.

Arno

johns <johns123xxx (AT) xxxmoscow (DOT) com> wrote in
message news:d59r0v$a5n$1 (AT) news (DOT) fsr.net...

Unlikely. Its more likely that spike killed the PS and that
died badly, killing what was powered from it, or there
wasnt even a power spike at all and the PS just died.

Very unlikely indeed.

Hardware data recovery services usually run around $1000 U.S. per harddrive.

--
DaveW



"Bryon Lape" <aintnoway (AT) blahblahblah (DOT) com> wrote

straw grasping is in order here, what i'd try is adding one as a slave to
working system and see if it shows up, then I'd try the other one.

I was recently successful doing that with a "dead" drive that wouldn't spin
up in the owner's computer. It was cryin' time again in PC city, etc., but
for some reason unknown to me, it spun up in my system and I was able to
grab the My Doc folder before it failed.

Another trick i read about, and tried without success, is freezing the drive
for an hour or so, and then putting it quickly in as a slave. They say when
this works you have about 5 minutes to get what you gotta get. The theory
is the freeze shrinks the metel and the stuck spindle is released until
expansion due to friction heat sticks it again.

Avery