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Broken USB HDD - possible chance to regain access

ravenstar68
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

I have a Seagate passport 1TB USB 3 HDD which gave up the ghost this week,

However although the drive was not showing up as a USB device on my PC, I noted that it was still spinning up even though the light was not coming on on the drive.

So I prised the case apart and inside is a standard 2.5 inch HDD which is connected to a PCB which provides the connection between the SATA port and the USB port.

I had a spare external 2.5 inch drive enclosure - albeit with a drive that has linux mint on it (that I haven't used in a while) so I swapped the "broken" drive over, plugged in the USB cable and once again I had access to the drive.

So now I have 2 alternatives to get it going.

1.  Get a second external HDD enclosure.
2.  See if I can order a replacement PCB and re-assemble the Passport device with the new PCB

However there is another point to be taken on board.

Be wary throwing out broken external drives, they may not be as broken as you thought and dumpster divers may still be able to get at the data on them.

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4 REPLIES 4

Buffer6
Legend

Well done, as long as it's the enclosure you crack open and not the hard drive, it can work OK

ravenstar68
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

Totally agree - however the point where the seam is is above the level of the HDD, it was simply a case of getting enough of a crack to get a tool in to ease the rest of it open.  You'd have to ba a real klutz to damage the HDD itself.  I suppose I was fortunate in that it was only the PCB that went.

I'm probably going to order a new enclosure rather than get a PCB - I did find the latter on ebay but it was in America and shipping to the UK would have been nearly four times as much as they were charging for the board itself - lol

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Tudor
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

I’ve done lots of lift and shift of HDDs and SSDs, I usually just buy a case from Amazon, not a great believer in EBay.


Tudor
There are 10 types of people: those who understand binary and those who don't and F people out of 10 who do not understand hexadecimal c1a2a285948293859940d9a49385a2

Adduxi
Very Insightful Person
Very Insightful Person

When I dispose of old HD's, I open them up and cut the platters with metal cutters. Overkill I know, but that's just me!

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