Discord
Changelog
Over the last few days, I’ve been doing a fair amount of research into data recovery options, spoke to additional data recovery companies, and even had a member of the staff get me in touch with a buddy who did hard drive recoveries in the past to discuss some details.
Details About the Data Recovery Plan (for those who care)
As Best Buy has indicated it was a circuit board failure, and since some of the data recovery locations I spoke with said they try to recover data using this method: I am going to attempt to replace the circuit board in the hard drive myself. Sending it out to have that done runs upward of $500 (plus parts) from places like Disktopia. After some research, watching some YouTube videos on how it’s done (they make it seem oh-so-easy) and talking it over with the gentleman who has replaced hard drive circuit boards before, I think that at least part of this procedure I could do myself.
So once I get the drive back from Best Buy in the next day or two, I will be verifying some information on it and then ordering the circuit board. Depending on what is needed, I may need to send the current (fried) circuit board to a shop to have a chip taken from it and soldered to the new one. Then after that it’s a matter of putting the new circuit board into the drive, popping the drive into a computer, and praying to god it starts to spin and is actually recognized by the BIOS.
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What this Means About Moving Forward
This attempt at data recovery is going to take at least a week from whenever I finally get the drive back. If the new circuit board needs to be taken in to have soldering work done, it could take longer. So at this time, we’re looking at another week, at least, in which we’ll be in this current ‘limbo’ state.
Finally, based on this ever in-flux situation, I have recreated the poll at the top of this thread with one of the *two* options about what we should do if this final data recovery attempt is unsuccessful. Feel free to vote if you have a strong opinion as to one or the other. At this time, based on feedback and community response provided so far, those are the two options I’m prepared to go with.
Details About the Data Recovery Plan (for those who care)
As Best Buy has indicated it was a circuit board failure, and since some of the data recovery locations I spoke with said they try to recover data using this method: I am going to attempt to replace the circuit board in the hard drive myself. Sending it out to have that done runs upward of $500 (plus parts) from places like Disktopia. After some research, watching some YouTube videos on how it’s done (they make it seem oh-so-easy) and talking it over with the gentleman who has replaced hard drive circuit boards before, I think that at least part of this procedure I could do myself.
So once I get the drive back from Best Buy in the next day or two, I will be verifying some information on it and then ordering the circuit board. Depending on what is needed, I may need to send the current (fried) circuit board to a shop to have a chip taken from it and soldered to the new one. Then after that it’s a matter of putting the new circuit board into the drive, popping the drive into a computer, and praying to god it starts to spin and is actually recognized by the BIOS.
------------------------------------------------------------
What this Means About Moving Forward
This attempt at data recovery is going to take at least a week from whenever I finally get the drive back. If the new circuit board needs to be taken in to have soldering work done, it could take longer. So at this time, we’re looking at another week, at least, in which we’ll be in this current ‘limbo’ state.
Finally, based on this ever in-flux situation, I have recreated the poll at the top of this thread with one of the *two* options about what we should do if this final data recovery attempt is unsuccessful. Feel free to vote if you have a strong opinion as to one or the other. At this time, based on feedback and community response provided so far, those are the two options I’m prepared to go with.