On one beautiful morning as I woke up, for some strange reason my “Entertainment” share on our Freenas home server was …. missing !!
After plugging in a monitor onto the machine and rebooting I found that the BIOS was not picking up the hard drive anymore. Well, I thought this was the end of the drive, but it was peculiar that the drive was still spinning.
So, I contacted Piotr Kula, who is living in the UK now(was in South Africa for some time), and an old friend when he was here.
He told me that it might be that the firmware might have gone corrupted on the drive, and that it is actually still salvageable. He said that I will need to get a device to convert serial to ttl.
Great news for me, as our photos from the last 10 years was on the drive, and for some strange reason I have not done the “backup” thing.
I set off to find more information about this issue, and immediate came upon hundreds of articles with the same diagnostics I have found. Most of the drives could not be detected by the BIOS although the drive was still spinning, and most of all, it was certain models of Seagate.
Found this very cool video which actually explains the process very cool – (not embeddable 🙁 ) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29FztWJVxbM
One thing that was a problem was getting the serial to ttl, or a direct usb-to-serial-to-ttl device.
After looking at various places, I found the ideal device at RS-Component in Kyalami, Gauteng. The deivce is a USB->TTL converter, and very neatly done, with output pins for the Tx and Rx of the serial interface for a measly R106 (cheapest quote I got for data recovery was R4500!!!).
After reading a couple of guides and the YouTube videos, I managed to get my 500 GB drive and data back, what a relieve. I still have to upgrade the firmware to the latest version still.
I found this “Wild West of IT” quite amusing and would like to do some other hard core tricks in the future, and have asked friends to bring me drives they thought were broken to see if I can learn myself even more about this unknown area of computer hardware.
Guide: