Old Hard Drives

When you visit family, and someone hands you an old hard drive from 22 years ago and asks for a data recovery because it could have your moms letters on it, you don't question it.  Grab that hard drive and take it.

So I started a little journey.  I popped it into my PATA USB case, and plugged it in.  It did not register with the system (I'm using Linux so I should at least see a USB interface get logged, even if the hardware has failed).

It spun up.  There were no clicks (so the hardware had not failed).  I dug into the logs - nothing, indicating the interface board was likely the problem.

So, I took the interface board off.  It was a Western Digital WD400 from 2003 (I told you it was 22 years old).  I grabbed my Western Digital WD400 from my case and started to swap the interface boards temporarily to commence a recovery.

One screw changed between them.  There are associated with the WD400 product line, but actually have different model numbers.  I'd wager that if it wasn't for that screw being in the wrong place and not being able to be anchored down properly, it would have been perfect, yet this would not be.

I could have 3D printed a bracket that fit across and held the interface circuit board down, but I just put the original back in, and looked at the jumpers.  Old PATA/IDE hard drives had a jumper on them for "Master", "Slave", and sometimes one or two other options (such as "CS" or "Chip Select").  There were no more than two IDE drives on the same IDE cable because of the electronic design.  One would be designated the "master", and the other a "slave".  In later years, they added a "chip select" option to try and make it a little more plug-and-play.

I had the thought I should move the jumper from Master to CS, and suddenly the old interface loaded when it was reconnected.  Ah hah!

It loaded no files (an empty filesystem).  The next step is always to run a recovery, just in case a new filesystem was put over the top of an old one.  So, I ran :

photorec /d Documents/recovery /dev/sdc

This dumped a few web files (CSS, XML, and HTML), a few executables (EXE and DLL), a few TXT files (that turned out to be nothing more than configuration files, registry files and some text extracted from executables).  Two files, a WAB and an EDB, both stood out to me, because a WAB is supposedly a Web Address Book, and EDB is an Exchange Database.  Turns out, they were simply mislabeled data files for the executables.

 No, the drives did not have any letters from my mother.  But it's better to know than not to.