Hard drive question
 

I won't go into the cause but I now have a 160gb SATA drive that has a circuit board that looks like a blown automotive fuse. It doesn't work and before I unplugged it, it only tried to cycle on over and over again. The problem is, that drive has every porn vid and song I've collected for the last few years on it. (This is what I get for reorganizing my drives for the last week). Obviously I can't take it to a data recovery place because of the embarassment factor of the porn.

My questions are

Can I replace the circuit board on the drive with another one temporarily. I have a 120gb SATA from the same manufacturer.

Can I recover the files from the drives I tranferred them from? I transferred them hours before the meltdown and each folder ("Videos" and "Music") was on another drive and deleted after they were transferred. Neither of these drives have been written to with anything new yet. I already tried "system restore" and in typical Microsoft half-assed fashion the folders reappeared but they were empty.


Thanks in advance.

hitting you up on icq...

"Obviously I can't take it to a data recovery place because of the embarassment factor of the porn."

heh are you serious?

Yes you can, however, sometimes a circuit board from a smaller drive gives problems. Circuit boards from same size or bigger drives work 99% of the time.

Absolutely. There are special tools for that. Some examples:

GetDataBack
Easy Recovery
R-Studio
Stellar
VirtualLab

freeware
Restoration

Hope this helps you.

And btw, I would understand that you won't let your data get recovered by professionals because of their prices (I bet you can't find any company doing it under $2000), but because of it is porn? Come on!

Thank you kindly for your assistance sir. :)

My misteress and I chose not to be seen in the buff... No need for further lengthy dialogs... :warning

It's probably gay porn (based on the info in his sig)

GetDataBack helped me getting everything back few months ago when my hd died on me. Everything I put on it since I started using it, even deleted files etc.