Ok, not to beat a dead horse here as there are numerous other topics on hard drives sneaking around computers unrecognized like Navy SEALS, but I cannot find an answer to my problem.
My girlfriend’s hard drive died on her with all of her pictures, lectures, etc etc, accumulated during her four years of college. Backups?? None. All that was in existence was the clicking of a dead hard drive.
So, with all previous efforts proving futile, I broke down and bought an identical hard drive (same model #, part #, and MLC # — which was hard enough to find as it was), and attempted the much talked about, rarely seen platter swap.
Before the swap, I had one bad drive, one good drive (it was recognized in an enclosure when hooked up to my pc via usb). I put the old platter in the new hard drive and plugged it into the enclosure, to no avail. To make sure I hadn’t done anything damaging to the new hard drive boards, etc, I returned the original platter from the new drive to its old home and the drive worked fine, so that leads me to believe that the problem lies in the old drives platter.
On a side note, I also tried the platter from the new drive in the old drive and that did not work either.
When the new drive with its original platter is put in the computer, it is recognized in bios. When the new drive with old platter is put in the computer, it is not recognized in bios. When either platter in the old drive is put in the computer, neither one is recognized in bios.
I have not tried booting from the Linux Live cd, could this somehow revert the platter to a once recognizable state? Or is our only hope about $800 away in sending it off for forensic analysis/recovery?
Any help/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
