Amazing news: I have my data back. Everything! What a great relief!

I spent the last weeks searching for the same hard disk that died in my desktop computer in order to try to swap the electronics from a working disk to my broken disk. The same meant not only the same brand and model (Samsung SP2504c), but also the same manufacturing date and same PCB (printed circuit board) version. Finally, I found an exact match. Actually, I bought another hard disk from a slightly different manufacturing date to perform some first tests. Today, the package arrived.

The first test run was not too promising: I swapped the electronics of the newly acquired disks to see if in general the transplantation could work. It didn’t. The one disk was four months older than the other. It did run up, but didnt show any data. When I swapped the PCB back, I saw that the operation hadn’t harmed the disk. So I took the risk to swap the PCB into my broken disk. It started (long moment of silence) and then all the partitions showed up in my system. Connected the external backup drive and started the backup – you cannot believe how happy I am right now.

The operation cost me about 40 bucks instead of 1500 for data recovery – thanks, ebay. And, yeah, Lord of the hard disks: I got the message. I’ll backup every week from now on. Promise.