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Frank Rappa has seven years of experience as a legal professional and over ten years in business management. In 2007, Rappa earned his J.D. from Thomas Jefferson School of Law (ABA). He graduated from East Carolina University with a B.A. in philosophy, mathematics and arts foundation, and is currently pursing an MBA. LEGAL PROFESSIONAL & BUSINESS CONSULTANT
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Solvate Blog

By Julie Ruvolo, December 3rd, 2009 | No comments

Hard Drive Rehab

Tags: delegate, harddrive, lacie, procrastination

A post for those who have had hard drive headaches

and feel alienated from your hardware.

A post on when it’s time to delegate.

Two years ago my Lacie external hard drive — home to at least a lot of mp3s, and it’s been so long I forget what else — stopped mounting. That means that it still sounds like it’s alive when I try to plug it in to my computer, I can’t access any files.

I hoped it was a problem with the cord or my laptop. I tried two computers. The Genius Bar. My friend Chad. The problem was definitely with the hard drive, and not the connection cord, power cord, or my computer.

Thing is, I didn’t want to send the drive off to repair, even if it was under warranty (which it no longer was). What if they lost it? What if someone copied my data?

So the drive sat where it was for two long years and I started listening to Pandora.

Procrastination, it appears, is a clear sign it’s time to delegate.

Enter Solvate. This is what I emailed:

request

In a follow-up exchange I clarified I didn’t want to send the drive out, and I didn’t want to fork over for GeekSquad to come to my office. Were there other options?

Later that day this is what I heard back:

Hi Julie,

Here’s what our hardware-savvy Timesmith David had to say about your hard drive. If you’re not comfortable fixing the hard drive yourself, or if this is too much, just let me know and we’ll get an estimate for on-site service.

“From extensive experience dealing with external hard drives, I generally find that among older Lacie drives, the chipset and power supply in the enclosure are the parts that go bad, not the actual drive itself.

There are a few things you can do here:

The first of which is to buy an adapter that will simply connect to the raw hard driveitself and then connect to your computer via usb. You can then transfer the data to another drive. You can see said adapter here.

The second option is to buy a new hard drive enclosure. You simply remove thehard drive from your current enclosure and place it in a new one. A new enclosure that will fit your drive can be found here. (I couldn’t find an enclosure with FW800 ports on it that support your drive type).

Please note that both of these options require you to open up your hard drive and physically disconnect the drive and remove it from the enclosure. It involves removing a few screws and unplugging a few cables. It isn’t too difficult.

Here is a video on youtube showing someone taking a drive apart:

Personally, I would buy the adapter (to transfer data) and a new RAID 1 external hard drive all together. Data is valuable, and with a RAID 1 “Mirror” array, data bits are written simultaneously to two identical drives housed in the same enclosure. This is done for redundancy, because it provides a duplicate “mirror” copy of your data on a second drive. Two 500GB drives would form 500GB of storage space and if one drive in the array has trouble, your data is still intact and accessible on the second drive. I recommend this drive. If that drive doesn’t do it for you and you want just a good, reliable external, I recommend this one. I have been using these external drives in professional recording studios for over 4 years and have yet to experience a failure.”

Please let me know what steps you’d like to take next or if you have any questions.

Regards,

Mike

Ok so this adapter would let me pull the data off the bad drive and transfer it onto a good one, and I would get my music back.

I was feeling a bit DIY and decided to try it. I had Solvate order me the recommended Universal Drive Adapter, “The Swiss Army Knife of Disk Connectivity.”

It arrived that week but I put off doing anything about it for two months and the Adapter just sat there, until this weekend.

Getting started:

First I had to take my hard drive apart to use the universal adapter. Armed with a laser pointer, Swiss Army Knife and screwdriver I got to work. But I could only find one screw to remove and got stuck at step 1. Prep time: 15 minutes (had to find the screwdriver).

David the Timesmith provided instructions on this part that I clearly skipped over, so I tried Google, and only later realized he had provided a link to the same video:

how to take apart a lacie 250gb hard drive

My love of YouTube is affirmed — the video was exactly what I needed and even easy to follow without audio. Thanks David! Turns out the second screw was hidden under the “warrant voided if seal broken” sticker.

Hard drive disassembled in 15 minutes.

Back to the Universal Drive Adapter instructions. Something about masters and slaves and a link to clarifying instructions where, once I figured out I had a Seagate drive (so that’s what they do!) I could look up more on how to make sure it’s set to Master.

All of which was a royal waste of time, since I read the wrong set of instructions for an IDE/5.25 ATAPI Drive, whereas I was dealing with a SATA Drive. But good to know! I pulled out some last remaining cables and was ready to start setting up the Universal Drive Adapter to the now stripped hard drive. Time spent: 20 minutes.

Found the master setting!

Now, time to plug the Adapter into my hard drive and transfer my files. But the plugs did not match. One is a “4 pin” plug and the other is a “Crimping SATA” plug. Did I rip out some extra cords? I googled the drive — Barracuda 7200.8 – and No, I didn’t rip out anything out of the ordinary. So how do I connect the 4-pin thing to Crimping SATA plug?

Is there such a thing as a 4 pin crimping sata connector?

Fourth result down on Google looks like something purchasable from NewEgg. I zoom in on the image and it does in fact look like the connector I need, for $3.99. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Turns out my drive is so old that it needs a connector for the Adapter.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t mind spending an hour on the weekend learning self-empowerment by disassembling a hard drive. I don’t mind that there is a clear next step and I feel confident that I am going to finish this project in another hour.

The problem is that I’ve procrastinated for two years with this damn thing. I didn’t didn’t know where to send it and didn’t want to send it out anyway.

Now that I’m mid-way, I’m procrastinating again and haven’t spent the 120 seconds required to order a $3.99 part on the next tab over from this blog post.

With that in mind I’m kicking into gear and ordering the part to take one last go at this. And if I keep procrastinating, I have a nice lifeline:

If you’re not comfortable fixing the hard drive yourself, or if this is too much, just let me know and we’ll get an estimate for on-site service.