For a little bit more than a year now my Dad has had a failed Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Hard Drive with important data on it that he really needed to recover but would be too expensive to recover it if we had of sent it of to a data recovery centre.

I’ve tried many times before to recover the data, but have failed on all attempts because the problem is that the Hard Drive is not getting any external power to it.

But for about a week now my Dad has been telling me that he need’s files from it more than ever now because it contains images of our house and how it looked before we added an extension to it, we need these images because the council need’s to see proof of what it looked like before and what we’ve done to it.

I told my dad that I knew the Hard Drive was failing because it wasn’t getting any external power to it and that’s why his PC couldn’t find it and that the only way to get it to work would be to replace the hard-drives entire circuit with another one from that range unfortunately amongst all my old Hard Drives I have I didn’t have another Maxtor 9 to take it from.

So now my options were only two either get a data recover centre to do it at a costly price or look for an old Hard Drive somewhere online like EBay, I decided to go for the second option, however before I started looking on the web for one I thought it would be a good idea to take a look at this site I’ve seen before with an explanation on how to do it.

I searched for the site and found it in no time at all unfortunately I could not find the document that I had seen before, maybe they removed it so people would get them to do it for them or maybe it was on another site that it linked to, who knows however all was not lost because I did find this:

http://www.dataclinic.co.uk/data-recovery/DRF-Maxtor-DiamondMax-Plus9.pdf

This was a PDF document that included an image of a Maxtor 9 Hard Drive, I started looking at the hard-drive and wondered what the purple cable was all about, luckily enough besides the image was a line pointing to a caption with the following words “Data Clinic hard wire” this made me thought that maybe this was how they recovered Hard Drives that were falling because of power loss, so I went to get some wire and some cutters and cut a small bit or wire and placed it in between these two connections that the image showed, I had to stick it down with tap because I didn’t have a solder to hand has my dad was not in.

I immediately put the hard-drive inside my dad’s pc and booted it up and to my surprise there it was Windows XP had detected the Maxtor 9 Hard Drive however the Hard Drive was having troubles copying the files I needed across so I had to switch it off.

I then tried it a couple of more times but this time it would not load and I thought all was lost once again, until I tried it one more time, this time I placed the wire on top of the two connections with no tap, and made sure the Hard Drive was upside down as this seemed to have a better effect on the Hard Drives performance maybe because it was putting pressure on the Hard Drives disk as it turned, this time the PC booted up fine and the Hard Drive was not making any noises as it was before so I quickly copied all files across first the most important ones then the ones that went so important.

My Dad is happy now that I’ve managed to recover all of his files and that we didn’t have to send it of to a data recover centre which I’ve asked for a quote from one before and it was in the excess of £500.

However I do not recommend that you try this at home unless you want to risk it as you could make things worse, but then again you never know you may just recover your files.

That is all for now I have a BBQ to attend too with my family who has just arrived as the sun has finally come out after it was raining, see you later people. 😀