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I heard a loud pop and PC shutdown it appears my PSU died after a power surge and took one of my HDD's with it. I'm not seeing it in windows or the bios I'm wondering if there is anything else I can check to see if I can get some of the data off the drive. I backed it up recently so it's not a total loss but I'd like to get a couple days worth of work that wasn't backed up if at all possible.

ark_angel wrote:

I heard a loud pop and PC shutdown it appears my PSU died after a power surge and took one of my HDD's with it. I'm not seeing it in windows or the bios I'm wondering if there is anything else I can check to see if I can get some of the data off the drive. I backed it up recently so it's not a total loss but I'd like to get a couple days worth of work that wasn't backed up if at all possible.

The HDD circuit board may be damaged. You could try picking up a used HDD of the same model and transplanting the burnt circuit board.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

I heard a loud pop and PC shutdown it appears my PSU died after a power surge and took one of my HDD's with it. I'm not seeing it in windows or the bios I'm wondering if there is anything else I can check to see if I can get some of the data off the drive. I backed it up recently so it's not a total loss but I'd like to get a couple days worth of work that wasn't backed up if at all possible.

The HDD circuit board may be damaged. You could try picking up a used HDD of the same model and transplanting the burnt circuit board.

Thanks for the advice I have a couple of those drives around so I tried it and still nothing.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

I heard a loud pop and PC shutdown it appears my PSU died after a power surge and took one of my HDD's with it. I'm not seeing it in windows or the bios I'm wondering if there is anything else I can check to see if I can get some of the data off the drive. I backed it up recently so it's not a total loss but I'd like to get a couple days worth of work that wasn't backed up if at all possible.

The HDD circuit board may be damaged. You could try picking up a used HDD of the same model and transplanting the burnt circuit board.

No. It's not the 1990s anymore dud

Modern drives write adaptive data -- calibration and remapped sector information -- to the firmware on the PCB, making each PCB's FW unique to the platters in its own drive's PCB -- so PCB replacement is a no-go, you'd have to do a firmware copy onto the identical PCB.

But it's not so simple(!!) as removing a tiny FW chip from a failed PCB and soldering it onto the replacement PCB, as that boat has sailed too and now the firmware might well be in the controller chip nowadays, and you're not going to successfully swap that.

If you knew how and had the tools, maybe you could read the info you need from the chip containing the FW in the failed drive, if it's actually only the board and not the chip itself which is fried, and then maybe in magic world you could reflash that info into the chip on the working identical PCB.

TL;DR: no point in messing around with fubar storage media, have at least 2 backups.

It's also a good idea to automate the backups if you can in order to avoid exactly this problem. If you have to sit there and wait for the backup to finish doing what it's doing, then eventually you'll stop doing it.

ark_angel wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

I heard a loud pop and PC shutdown it appears my PSU died after a power surge and took one of my HDD's with it. I'm not seeing it in windows or the bios I'm wondering if there is anything else I can check to see if I can get some of the data off the drive. I backed it up recently so it's not a total loss but I'd like to get a couple days worth of work that wasn't backed up if at all possible.

The HDD circuit board may be damaged. You could try picking up a used HDD of the same model and transplanting the burnt circuit board.

Thanks for the advice I have a couple of those drives around so I tried it and still nothing.

What's the drive model?

Dude, it won't matter. If it's dead, then it's dead.

There's things like the freezer trick which can sometimes help with certain kinds of mechanical problems, but if the electronics got cooked, then it's dead Jim. Very dead.

As far as I know, mechanical drives are easier to recover data from than SSDs when all else fails, but it's still usually outside the capabilities(or budget) of the average person.

Redocbew wrote:

Dude, it won't matter. If it's dead, then it's dead.

It may not help. But no harm in knowing.

No harm for you, sure. You're not the one with a dead drive on their hands.

Anyway, my usual first step for any kind of data recovery is a liveCD with gparted on it just to see if the partition table is intact. If it is, then I can probably get to it from within the OS somehow. Things would get dicey for me otherwise, but there's people here who know way more about storage than I do. In general, if you can't access the drive in any way at all, not even to do a direct byte for byte copy, then it's going to be difficult to recover anything from it. Since you have a recent backup, then it'd probably take longer to investigate that than it would to just rebuild whatever is missing from your backup.

If there is no urgency, keep trying different things and suggestions. You never know. You might be able to revive it through sheer dumb luck.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

sheer dumb luck.

Hmm, so many opportunities for snark there... Must... Resist...

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

The HDD circuit board may be damaged. You could try picking up a used HDD of the same model and transplanting the burnt circuit board.

Thanks for the advice I have a couple of those drives around so I tried it and still nothing.

What's the drive model?

It's a shucked easystore WD80EMAZ


My last backup was about 2 weeks ago and I'm pretty sure I can get 99% of the stuff between then and now back. It's just going to cost me time.

ark_angel wrote:

It's a shucked easystore WD80EMAZ.

Try un-shucking it. Put it in its original enclosure and connect via USB. If that fails, try it in the enclosure with the circuit board replaced. If that also fails, WD data recovery service might be the only option. It seems to be a 5400 rpm SMR drive if I am not wrong. That will probably make recovering data even harder. Does the drive spin up? Can you hear the heads moving? Maybe trying to read? Or is it completely dead with no signs of life?

Yeah don't do any of that stuff, unless you feel like throwing **** at the wall to see what sticks.

ark_angel wrote:

My last backup was about 2 weeks ago and I'm pretty sure I can get 99% of the stuff between then and now back. It's just going to cost me time.

You could send it to some reputable data recovery firm in India. The cost would likely be peanuts thanks to the exchange rate. No assurances about the privacy of your data though.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

It's a shucked easystore WD80EMAZ.

Try un-shucking it. Put it in its original enclosure and connect via USB. If that fails, try it in the enclosure with the circuit board replaced. If that also fails, WD data recovery service might be the only option. It seems to be a 5400 rpm SMR drive if I am not wrong. That will probably make recovering data even harder. Does the drive spin up? Can you hear the heads moving? Maybe trying to read? Or is it completely dead with no signs of life?

Holy **** that worked. Everything just pulled up when I unshucked it. I guess next it to test my sata ports and get everything off this drive.

Sounds like the surge killed the SATA port.

SATA cable would be a cheaper thing to replace than a motherboard, so try swapping that.
Does your motherboard happen to have SATA ports serviced by different controllers - maybe a different port would work?

My motherboard is an ASUS X570 TUF Gaming plus wifi and I use 5 sata drives and only one of them stopped working. The drive that stopped working is a shucked drive that I had to cover the 3.3v pin with kapton tape to work with my PSU. My current thinking is when I removed all the cables to replace the blown PSU with a working one the tape got moved. But I don't dare check until I get everything onto my backup drive incase it decides to not boot again.

ark_angel wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

It's a shucked easystore WD80EMAZ.

Try un-shucking it. Put it in its original enclosure and connect via USB. If that fails, try it in the enclosure with the circuit board replaced. If that also fails, WD data recovery service might be the only option. It seems to be a 5400 rpm SMR drive if I am not wrong. That will probably make recovering data even harder. Does the drive spin up? Can you hear the heads moving? Maybe trying to read? Or is it completely dead with no signs of life?

Holy **** that worked. Everything just pulled up when I unshucked it. I guess next it to test my sata ports and get everything off this drive.

I'm just as amazed as you are. Sheer dumb luck, is what that is.

ark_angel wrote:

The drive that stopped working is a shucked drive that I had to cover the 3.3v pin with kapton tape to work with my PSU my current thought is when I removed all the cables to replace the blown PSU with a working one the tape got moved.

Or that

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Try un-shucking it. Put it in its original enclosure and connect via USB. If that fails, try it in the enclosure with the circuit board replaced. If that also fails, WD data recovery service might be the only option. It seems to be a 5400 rpm SMR drive if I am not wrong. That will probably make recovering data even harder. Does the drive spin up? Can you hear the heads moving? Maybe trying to read? Or is it completely dead with no signs of life?

Holy **** that worked. Everything just pulled up when I unshucked it. I guess next it to test my sata ports and get everything off this drive.

I'm just as amazed as you are. Sheer dumb luck, is what that is.

Thanks for the idea I was about to throw in the towel and call it a loss.

Cool, and yeah it's probably a good idea to consider that drive extremely suspect in any case. I'd pull everything I could off of it as soon as possible.

ark_angel wrote:

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

ark_angel wrote:

Holy **** that worked. Everything just pulled up when I unshucked it. I guess next it to test my sata ports and get everything off this drive.

I'm just as amazed as you are. Sheer dumb luck, is what that is.

Thanks for the idea I was about to throw in the towel and call it a loss.

It's a good thing that the drive didn't power on with the replaced circuit board. That could have bricked the drive if Topinio's firmware related information is correct. Maybe you could test the drive with the replaced circuit board after you have gotten all your data off of it. In the name of "curiosity and what the hell, let's try this"

After backing up everything off the drive I looked at it and I was correct that when I pulled the sata power connector off the tape covering the 3.3v pin came with it causing the hdd to get stuck in a hard reset loop and not show up in bios. After replacing the tape it now shows up like normal and a disk scan showed no errors. This whole ordeal did convince me I need to invest in a UPS so a freak incident won't take me out like that again. If anyone has any suggestions on backup software to an external drive that can deal with a render asset library of ~2tb+, 1.5 million+ files in ~500k folders and can update when I organize assets I'd really appreciate it. Because right now I'm just doing it manually which is an all day transferring ordeal.

Thank you again to everyone that helped you really saved me a lot of time.

I like the stuff from Synology. The pricing on their higher end stuff is kind of bonkers compared to what you could build yourself, but if you want something easy without a lot of setup and configuration they're pretty nifty. I have one of their four drive models which I replicate my home directory to automagically every night, and then it replicates that up to S3. That's my way of taking care of the 3-2-1 rule. Three copies. Two different devices. One off-site.

https://www.paragon-software.com/free/br-free/

The community edition should fit your needs. Plus, it's German developed so you can bet on quality and reliability. They take their work seriously.

For a UPS, I have a few from APC. I have an 850VA model hooked up to this machine which has done the job pretty well so far. Just remember to also hook up a monitor to the backed up plugs in addition to your PC. Don't ask me how I know.

As a side note, this is a good example of why it is best to provide as much info as possible up front. If we'd known it was a shucked/modded drive, and that you'd disconnected/reconnected the drive, we might've arrived at the answer sooner.

Synology NAS seems to work very well. I'm not using half of the things that it could do.
I use this UPS for my gaming PC. They appear to have a newer model that is less expensive.