CIFS Drive Recovery

[drewc2333]

3 Weeks ago I had a Western Digital 250Gb NetCenter fail. The drive would spin up click about 6 times and spin down then do it again and then quit working.

I removed the PCB from the drive and tried it on another hard drive I have and it did the same thing. So I figured the problem was in the PCB and not the head. I purchased a PCB for an identical drive.

The U12 chip on this board stores the head tuning information so I had a guy at work who solders for a living remove the chip from the old board and replace the one on the new board.

On power up the hard drive no longer clicks and seems to be idle waiting for access.

Trying several data recovery programs I kept coming up with a file system error however is was finding file starts and directories but nothing it could interpret as a file or file path. Googled the drive...its formatted Common Internet File System (CIFS) so that it can be accessed by MACs and PCs on the same network. Seems this problem is fairly common with the WD2500JB.

The drive is recognized by the BIOS and by windows but it sees it as a RAW drive; the PCB doesn't know there is a data on the drive.

How do I recover the information without losing it? The data is irreplaceable. Is there a recovery software that support CIFS file systems?

 

[goombawaho]

If it's really irreplaceable data, you should send it out for professional recovery and you shouldn't even have attempted the soldering, etc. that you have already done.

I would say if it was just important data, you could try a few things, but with irreplaceable data, jeez, I wouldn't have even plugged the drive in for fear of doing more damange, let alone do what you did.

 

[drewc2333]

Thanks for your help.

And thanks for the scolding, mom.

I recovered the data last night with Virtuallab.

 

[goombawaho]

Well that's great and congratulations. The reason I told you not to mess with it is that most non-professionals would tend to cause more hard than good. Not knowing your skill level, I would always opt to tell people "do not mess with it".