There was smoke coming out of my hard drive! Anything I can do now??
February 12, 2019 5:55 PM Subscribe
My fellow Meafites, Oh why have you led me astray?
Please excuse the dramatics. I posted this question and received advice from a few people saying that we needed to buy this item to get the info off a malfunctioning harddrive. The hardrive is a Seagate model# ST980825AS 80GB and it uses a usb mini 2.0 because it comes in this case.
Well I took the advice given. First I purchased a brand new drive and put my drive into the brand new case because I think they said the case might be the problem. It didn't work. The green light on both cases however did light up when I attached them to the newer drive.So I guess the case was not the problem.
Battleplan #2 was the other suggestion- to buy that SATA/IDI hookup kit. Well I did and just hooked it up ONLY to the power. .. I didn't even have a chance to hook it up to the computer yet and suddenly smoke started coming out of my hard drive!
Did this kit do even more damage???
As mentioned previously, My employer and I are trying to get some confidential files off this old drive that I may have accidentally damaged, by plugging it into a universal adapter where the voltage may have been a little high. Thats where the trouble started. But it never smoked!! Why did taking the advice make the hard drive smoke up?
My employer refuse to let the drive into anyone elses hands including IT because of the nature of the files. If I can't get these files off of this he'll just throw the drive out and very likely- fire me. :(
Is there any hope now?
I
Please excuse the dramatics. I posted this question and received advice from a few people saying that we needed to buy this item to get the info off a malfunctioning harddrive. The hardrive is a Seagate model# ST980825AS 80GB and it uses a usb mini 2.0 because it comes in this case.
Well I took the advice given. First I purchased a brand new drive and put my drive into the brand new case because I think they said the case might be the problem. It didn't work. The green light on both cases however did light up when I attached them to the newer drive.So I guess the case was not the problem.
Battleplan #2 was the other suggestion- to buy that SATA/IDI hookup kit. Well I did and just hooked it up ONLY to the power. .. I didn't even have a chance to hook it up to the computer yet and suddenly smoke started coming out of my hard drive!
Did this kit do even more damage???
As mentioned previously, My employer and I are trying to get some confidential files off this old drive that I may have accidentally damaged, by plugging it into a universal adapter where the voltage may have been a little high. Thats where the trouble started. But it never smoked!! Why did taking the advice make the hard drive smoke up?
My employer refuse to let the drive into anyone elses hands including IT because of the nature of the files. If I can't get these files off of this he'll just throw the drive out and very likely- fire me. :(
Is there any hope now?
I
Response by poster: I didn't notice any noises.
posted by fantasticness at 6:26 PM on February 12, 2019
posted by fantasticness at 6:26 PM on February 12, 2019
I have used similar kits many times for my job in IT. If plugging the drive into power caused it to smoke, then it was already damaged in a pretty serious way.
The data might still be recoverable, but it's going to be a little expensive (probably around $500) and delicate work. I think you are going to have to trust someone. I'd recommend Data Medics personally.
I promise that unless this hard drive has plans for a nuclear bomb or blackmail on the President that no one care about this data as much as you do. A data recovery company sees hundreds of hard drives a year, with financial records and homemade pornography and any other kind of sensitive data you might imagine. You can get them to sign a non-disclosure agreement if you're that worried about it.
Even if the data is a total loss, your boss is probably not going to fire you. And frankly, if they do fire you over a broken hard drive--which based on your original question might have been broken before you even plugged it into the power adapter--then they're doing you a favor in the long term.
posted by JDHarper at 6:47 PM on February 12, 2019 [14 favorites]
The data might still be recoverable, but it's going to be a little expensive (probably around $500) and delicate work. I think you are going to have to trust someone. I'd recommend Data Medics personally.
I promise that unless this hard drive has plans for a nuclear bomb or blackmail on the President that no one care about this data as much as you do. A data recovery company sees hundreds of hard drives a year, with financial records and homemade pornography and any other kind of sensitive data you might imagine. You can get them to sign a non-disclosure agreement if you're that worried about it.
Even if the data is a total loss, your boss is probably not going to fire you. And frankly, if they do fire you over a broken hard drive--which based on your original question might have been broken before you even plugged it into the power adapter--then they're doing you a favor in the long term.
posted by JDHarper at 6:47 PM on February 12, 2019 [14 favorites]
i would definitely go with a drive recovery service at this point. as jd harper says above - they literally do not care what is on the drive, their function is to get you as much workable data as they can.
posted by koroshiya at 7:10 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by koroshiya at 7:10 PM on February 12, 2019 [1 favorite]
why have you led me astray?
That's completely and utterly unfair.
You have a broken disk drive with allegedly vital data on it. The best advice you got was to take it to a professional data recovery service. You didn't do that, because you ignored all of the the completely sound advice you got about professional data recovery services being 100% equipped for confidentiality.
If anybody has led you astray it is not us but your employer, who should never have allowed a circumstance to arise in their business where (a) the loss of one external drive would have significant costs (b) mere physical access, as opposed to physical access plus possession of a whole-drive decryption key, was a significant threat to confidentiality (c) an employee feels caught in an impossible choice between fessing up to the boss and trying to self-repair complex electronics they've never been trained to handle.
External drives die all the time. This should not have been a disaster, and if you end up parting ways with a business that let it be so, your life will be the better for it.
posted by flabdablet at 7:26 PM on February 12, 2019 [55 favorites]
That's completely and utterly unfair.
You have a broken disk drive with allegedly vital data on it. The best advice you got was to take it to a professional data recovery service. You didn't do that, because you ignored all of the the completely sound advice you got about professional data recovery services being 100% equipped for confidentiality.
If anybody has led you astray it is not us but your employer, who should never have allowed a circumstance to arise in their business where (a) the loss of one external drive would have significant costs (b) mere physical access, as opposed to physical access plus possession of a whole-drive decryption key, was a significant threat to confidentiality (c) an employee feels caught in an impossible choice between fessing up to the boss and trying to self-repair complex electronics they've never been trained to handle.
External drives die all the time. This should not have been a disaster, and if you end up parting ways with a business that let it be so, your life will be the better for it.
posted by flabdablet at 7:26 PM on February 12, 2019 [55 favorites]
Response by poster: Thanks JD, So there's no way for us to fix it then?
Actually I don't believe it was broken before I plugged it into the adapter. The light turned on fine before I did that, and I found out later that other drives weren't being discovered by that pc either. It was only after plugging it in that the light went dead. So if I hadn't plugged it into that adapter, and I simply used another pc it almost certainly would've been fine.
Looking at the reviews of that Kit it seems it's common for that kit to toast hard drives. One reviewer claims that it's due to the way the SATA portion is made with hotglue and urges others not to use the power adapter in this kit for this reason. Unfortunately I didn't read the reviews before purchasing. :(
posted by fantasticness at 8:52 PM on February 12, 2019
Actually I don't believe it was broken before I plugged it into the adapter. The light turned on fine before I did that, and I found out later that other drives weren't being discovered by that pc either. It was only after plugging it in that the light went dead. So if I hadn't plugged it into that adapter, and I simply used another pc it almost certainly would've been fine.
Looking at the reviews of that Kit it seems it's common for that kit to toast hard drives. One reviewer claims that it's due to the way the SATA portion is made with hotglue and urges others not to use the power adapter in this kit for this reason. Unfortunately I didn't read the reviews before purchasing. :(
posted by fantasticness at 8:52 PM on February 12, 2019
A professional data recovery firm will STILL be able to recover whatever data remains.
However, it will now cost more.
posted by pdoege at 9:26 PM on February 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
However, it will now cost more.
posted by pdoege at 9:26 PM on February 12, 2019 [2 favorites]
Why did taking the advice make the hard drive smoke up?
Because it was already on life support, as others have said. You probably fried either an integrated circuit or a capacitor with the excess voltage. If you were a techie I'd suggest seeking out a circuit board (though for an old spinny-disk that would be nigh-on impossible) before going to data recovery, but the moral of this story is don't store important data a) on spinny-disks b) without redundancy. Had you or your boss dropped it -- or, frankly, left it in a drawer for [n] years -- you'd probably be in the same situation.
posted by holgate at 10:21 PM on February 12, 2019
Because it was already on life support, as others have said. You probably fried either an integrated circuit or a capacitor with the excess voltage. If you were a techie I'd suggest seeking out a circuit board (though for an old spinny-disk that would be nigh-on impossible) before going to data recovery, but the moral of this story is don't store important data a) on spinny-disks b) without redundancy. Had you or your boss dropped it -- or, frankly, left it in a drawer for [n] years -- you'd probably be in the same situation.
posted by holgate at 10:21 PM on February 12, 2019
With the greatest respect, I disagree that storing important data on spinny disks is in and of itself unsound. When spinny disks go bad, very few of their failure modes render all of the data held on them irrecoverable.
When a spinny disk's electronics die - even if they die from a gross insult like a massive overvoltage on the power supply - the overwhelming bulk of what's stored on their platters typically survives, and replacing the electronics will render it recoverable. When the platters themselves die they will generally do so progressively, giving you plenty of warning that the drive is overdue for replacement well before more than a tiny percentage of data becomes irrecoverable.
Solid state drives, by way of contrast, are indeed rather more reliable overall as a consequence of having no moving parts but when they fail they tend to drop their entire bundle all at once.
The vital point holgate makes that I can 100% get behind is the one about redundancy. If you care about your data, back it up. And if you care about data confidentiality, encrypt it and be careful with control of access to the decryption keys.
Another point that is perhaps not as well understood as it should be is that data recovery can be performed, and can be known and shown to have been performed successfully, without any human being ever even looking at the recovered data. Whatever kind of drive you're using, it will store every single block of data in a form that incorporates an error checking and correction code or ECC; when any given block is read back, the drive electronics make sure that the original data and its ECC match each other before handing that block off to the outside world.
Professional data recovery processes typically involve repairing, replacing or bypassing as much of a faulty drive as is necessary to restore the ability to pull data blocks off the media that match their own embedded ECC codes and rewrite these onto a new drive, which the reader itself will tell the operator is happening without any need at all for the operator to inspect the content of those data blocks in any way. This is also why data recovery remains completely feasible even for drives that have been whole-drive encrypted.
If you're working with a professional data recovery outfit, then the chances are super high that even if you don't press them to sign an NDA, nobody will ever actually be looking at your files anyway.
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 PM on February 12, 2019 [10 favorites]
When a spinny disk's electronics die - even if they die from a gross insult like a massive overvoltage on the power supply - the overwhelming bulk of what's stored on their platters typically survives, and replacing the electronics will render it recoverable. When the platters themselves die they will generally do so progressively, giving you plenty of warning that the drive is overdue for replacement well before more than a tiny percentage of data becomes irrecoverable.
Solid state drives, by way of contrast, are indeed rather more reliable overall as a consequence of having no moving parts but when they fail they tend to drop their entire bundle all at once.
The vital point holgate makes that I can 100% get behind is the one about redundancy. If you care about your data, back it up. And if you care about data confidentiality, encrypt it and be careful with control of access to the decryption keys.
Another point that is perhaps not as well understood as it should be is that data recovery can be performed, and can be known and shown to have been performed successfully, without any human being ever even looking at the recovered data. Whatever kind of drive you're using, it will store every single block of data in a form that incorporates an error checking and correction code or ECC; when any given block is read back, the drive electronics make sure that the original data and its ECC match each other before handing that block off to the outside world.
Professional data recovery processes typically involve repairing, replacing or bypassing as much of a faulty drive as is necessary to restore the ability to pull data blocks off the media that match their own embedded ECC codes and rewrite these onto a new drive, which the reader itself will tell the operator is happening without any need at all for the operator to inspect the content of those data blocks in any way. This is also why data recovery remains completely feasible even for drives that have been whole-drive encrypted.
If you're working with a professional data recovery outfit, then the chances are super high that even if you don't press them to sign an NDA, nobody will ever actually be looking at your files anyway.
posted by flabdablet at 11:02 PM on February 12, 2019 [10 favorites]
flabdablet: point completely taken. I was thinking more of the common situation where a spinny-disk is just left in a cupboard for years and fails on spin-up, by which time the prospect of finding electronics is dim. (I have older mechanical HDs with non-critical data in cold storage, but I got them in matched pairs.)
posted by holgate at 5:58 AM on February 13, 2019
posted by holgate at 5:58 AM on February 13, 2019
I was thinking more of the common situation where a spinny-disk is just left in a cupboard for years and fails on spin-up, by which time the prospect of finding electronics is dim.
That's usually the spindle lubrication going gluey rather than electronics failure though, and I would expect that in most cases a competent hard disk technician could open the mechanism in a clean air environment and get it to rotate again for long enough to image the drive without needing to replace any parts.
Leaving important data in long term cold storage on just about any kind of consumer-grade media is always going to be problematic. The defining characteristic of digital data is perfect replicability, and the safest way to keep data available on a time scale of more than a couple of decades is to perform regular checksummed replications and keep as many of the most recent copies as you have physical storage space for.
That said, I have a storage bin of old Apple II floppy disks - each one capable of holding a mind-boggling 140 kilobytes of data - that were last written in the mid 1980s, and most of those are still a bit-for-bit match with my moving archival copies of them.
posted by flabdablet at 7:10 AM on February 13, 2019 [4 favorites]
That's usually the spindle lubrication going gluey rather than electronics failure though, and I would expect that in most cases a competent hard disk technician could open the mechanism in a clean air environment and get it to rotate again for long enough to image the drive without needing to replace any parts.
Leaving important data in long term cold storage on just about any kind of consumer-grade media is always going to be problematic. The defining characteristic of digital data is perfect replicability, and the safest way to keep data available on a time scale of more than a couple of decades is to perform regular checksummed replications and keep as many of the most recent copies as you have physical storage space for.
That said, I have a storage bin of old Apple II floppy disks - each one capable of holding a mind-boggling 140 kilobytes of data - that were last written in the mid 1980s, and most of those are still a bit-for-bit match with my moving archival copies of them.
posted by flabdablet at 7:10 AM on February 13, 2019 [4 favorites]
The bit about securing decryption keys is especially worth repeating. One of the bitcoin services recently had a high ranking person die. He had some passwords in his brain that were written nowhere. They're looking at around $140 million lost.
Cryptography is great, just remember that if you lose the keys or forget the passwords your data will be completely gone beyond any hope of recovery.
And also I'd like to Nth the advice to back up critical data, ideally on a cloud service. Encrypt it if security is an issue but back that stuff up to a cloud somewhere. A "backup" to any media you keep near the computer means you're just one fire away from total data loss. And no back up at all is tempting fate.
posted by sotonohito at 10:20 AM on February 13, 2019
Cryptography is great, just remember that if you lose the keys or forget the passwords your data will be completely gone beyond any hope of recovery.
And also I'd like to Nth the advice to back up critical data, ideally on a cloud service. Encrypt it if security is an issue but back that stuff up to a cloud somewhere. A "backup" to any media you keep near the computer means you're just one fire away from total data loss. And no back up at all is tempting fate.
posted by sotonohito at 10:20 AM on February 13, 2019
A data recovery service is your only hope for getting the files back now, I'd say. If you're not comfortable with that, then I guess it's time to brush off that resume, because your boss is being extra unreasonable if they're unwilling to let a data recovery service handle the drive. Seriously, they deal with confidential files all the time, and unless you're working for the NSA or a mob boss, your circumstances are just not that special.
You are extremely likely to just make things worse at this point, so I wouldn't do anything else with the drive.
posted by Aleyn at 7:06 PM on February 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
You are extremely likely to just make things worse at this point, so I wouldn't do anything else with the drive.
posted by Aleyn at 7:06 PM on February 13, 2019 [1 favorite]
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posted by koroshiya at 6:22 PM on February 12, 2019