Hard Drive Failure

[pudge57]

I had a HD fail recently. It is only a 10gig Maxtor drive, but it has a lot of personal info on it like old papers and labs that I may need sometime soon. Like an idiot, I was fooling around with it while it was powered up, and it well.........shorted out the controller board (oops). Do any of you have any suggestions on how I could recover my data, without having to send it to a data recovery place, which is way to expensive.

PS: Do any of you think that a local pc shop could order and install a new controller card for the HD, or would it have to be a specialist.

[rangeral]

If you have other ide slots then plug it in to one of them jumped as master if windows is on it, if this is the only hard drive you have you may have to set that drive to hard disk 0 in bios if this is just an extra controller card aside from the ide slots on your motherboard. Could use all your system specs.

[pudge57]

I got U guys a little confused...I really mean the interface on the back of the HD. Not the IDE controller card.

[bullgator]

Hunt around for an identical drive and swap the boards out. The part #'s must match ! Try to find a drive that has suffered physical damage, generally the board is still good. This will allow you to at least get the data off. Try some of the traveling puter shows like marketproshows.com, if they are coming nearby several of their vendors usually have used maxtors.

[pudge57]

Hey does anyone know how difficult it would be to swap the "interface" boards on identical HDs? Or problems that I may run into.