What is Digg?49 Comments
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -10/+75If you don't like it, don't dig it. If it's really lame, report it.
But for *****'s sake, don't comment. We don't care. - merreborn, on 11/12/2007, -3/+51"And the best part was that I rescued my data and saved $100 by not buying a new drive."
This is a great hack for getting data off a drive you busted, but counting on it to work long term is idiotic. Get your data off, then go buy a new drive, or get the damn thing fixed. - DarkHorizon5, on 10/12/2007, -2/+36At least comment about how so many digg titles are misspelled.
- DerGeist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Plus he's lucky, he busted pin 39 which is just the activity pin. I doubt his little hack would work on any of the adjacent pins, like chipselect.
Having a crappy ground or activity connection might be ok, the system is made to deal with some noise anyway, but otherwise I'm not sure he'd have such fortunate results. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone if you're reading and getting curious. Just solder in a wire and hope instead. - johnalan, on 10/12/2007, -3/+13***** Good Work
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -6/+14who the hell breaks their IDE drive pins?
- Calabahn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10Good for you. Good ole yankee ingenuity. Now, next time remember to exert equal force on both sides of the cable connector when removing it, and line up those pins when connecting it.
- EvilTesdall, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Easily, if you pull the cable off to much to one side you will bend the pins, then when you try to put the cable back on you will smash them done even more. Then you will need needle nose plyers to bend it back, and before you know it you have lost a pin.
- Plastic9mm, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8Another way of doing it would be to swap the main board on the HD out if you have a like HD laying around.
I do this all the time at the shop for stubborn HDs. True, most of the time the drive has failed somewhere on the internals, but many times its just the main board.
Swap that sucker out for THE SAME modle board and good as new. Works best for recovery as you now have a useless drive without its main board, but trusty none the less. - Arnold22, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7If I had done that I'm pretty sure I would have copied everything to a new drive instead of "saving" 100 dollars on a new drive. None the less I have come close to this happening before and this would have saved my ass.
- burningpenguin, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6I -really- hate this typo.
- asteron, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Lots of times you could probably solder a wire to the back of the IDE connector where it touches the main board (though you might have to remove it first).
I would probably remove the board, desolder that pin, and replace it with one of the unused pins.... but yeah a broken pin is not that big of a deal. - Xeviar, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Looks like a great fix to recover potentially lost data!
BUT, I would never rely on this rig for regular use so a new drive would still be on order. - squirrelza, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3On one of my old motherboards there is about 5+ pins missing, but the hard drive still works perfectly. The hard drive is still capable of working fine with missing pins, correct?
- arem, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hey guys. I had no idea my article would make the front page. As you pointed out, the pin isn't crucial (the drive would work fine in windows safe mode), so it wasn't too dangerous to trust the pin.
- drgruney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The "hack" probably didn't do much of anything to actually work too. As was previously stated the pin that broke was the activity pin. So the LED at the front of the case would not have blinked. Had it been a data pin, still no big deal... IDE is a parallel transfer. One pin being out won't wang the whole thing normally. I've had drives with broken pins that worked fine... sometimes a little slow but they worked.
- ZeroMP, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Put it in the freezer! Oh wait, that wont work for his problem....
One time I had bought a new mobo and didn't have the right connections for the power buttons and such... So I wrapped a tiny paperclip around two pins to connect them and fire it up the first time. Then for about a month I just only used restart instead of shut down....
Worked until I got the right parts! - Krakn3Dfx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Nice, now make one to tell me how to access an old drive where I snapped the power connector off :).
- vibez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Great idea! I'm going to hunt down my broken drives and see what data I can salvage. I was always put off by having to solder a pin back on as my soldering sucks big time.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3done this before. Its just as easy to put the pin in the cable, then cut it off with some extra sticking out, then connect the drive to the cable.
Works like a charm. I fixed an 8 gig like that several years ago... it still works to this day! - GeeKman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I had to do this once. all i did was take an old big 4pin molex fan adapter (the ones with the 2 molex connectors male and female and having a small 3 pin connector for the fan) connector and cut the male end, and small 3pin connector off and solder that directly to the HDD PCB.
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Agreed. I have a disk with a snapped pin and miraculously it will work with any machine I throw it at and I have used it for unimportant or replaceable data (bt'd videos and the like). I think it may have ***** up a season of 24 I had on it, but other than that I haven't had any trouble with things I've taken off it. I just couldn't believe I didn't lose everything that was on when it happened.
I had an idea to replace the pin on the drive once, but it didn't work out. This idea is much better, but that drive of mine has been retired for a while now. Wish I found this a year ago.
Edit: I broke the pin on the same row, but in the right corner (if you hold the drive as the author did). Not sure what that one's for but I might look it up. - Hurricane, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I have a friend who works in IT at a bank.
When their hard drives go bad he brings em home to shoot at (red-neck computer nerds, also a VERY good method of sanitizing bank records from the drives).
I have found half a dozen good drives in the shootin pile that only have a bent pin, a few minutes with needle nosed pliers and I have a huge stockpile of extra storage. - RyGiL, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Good idea... I've never had pins fall out of a hard drive but had a few pins fall out of my monitor cables in the past. I would simply take a small paperclip, straighten it out and then cut off a small piece of the end with wire cutters... then just shove it in the hole. If it is too long, take it out and cut it a little smaller...
- jellygraph, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Haha ok, this was a bit of a time waster, but may be useful to _someone_
- spectre_25gt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Simple and brilliant. If things are really bad, though, don't forget you can always replace the controller (if you can find another drive of the same model).
- Doomhammer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Seems to me that even if you did manage to get it to work after doing something like this to, it would be a good idea to get all of your important data off as quickly as possible and get a new hard drive.
I'm going to laugh if he doesn't get a new drive, still doesn't back up, and the hack stops working. xD - Iam8up, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Totally agreed. I know I wouldn't want my naughty pictures of women on such a disk. What if was really lonely that night the sewing pin decided to give up on life?!
- lagrange, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1buried for being truly stupid
- epheterson, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Oh man! That guy should not have been using it for months. If I got it to work again, I'd back up my stuff and rarely, if ever, use that drive again.
- cygn, on 08/30/2008, -0/+1because the page is not online anymore, check the archived version here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071124044356/www.arem ... - tmcdigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think in the foil method he got lucky.. that pin was in a corner.. try getting that foil between two other pins without shorting any crucial data/power wires... now that's a trick...
I'm sure you'd resort to some soldering/bypassing of the pin in that circumstance, not foil-- albeit 4x more difficult than foil - intangible, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This would be even better if they showed the best way to save a broken SATA connection... My poor poor Raptor...
I love the smaller cables, but they are very easy to break off on drives that don't have all sides covered with plastic. - onewinger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Somewhat inaccurate... this isn't your straight up broken hard drive. But, a fix nevertheless, so not marking it as such.
Actually, the pin featured in the illustration is Pin 1, which is the /RESET pin, per the ATA specs. Even if Pin 39 was busted, that would be equally as bad, since it's crucial during device detection, indicating that the device is present by pulling 39 LOW:
http://case-mods.linear1.org/hdd-header-hardcore/ *for a few details, and
http://www.t13.org/docs2002/d1410r3b.pdf *for the full ATA specs.
Hope this helps!
Cheers - kirk1978, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0this is more like a temp solution... counting on the pin touching the left over pin in the drive, is a bit .. unstable.
those connector is less than a buck, you can get it in any electronic component store. just de-solder the old one and put in a new one, it will work like new! - av4rice, on 10/12/2007, -5/+5That headline is promising an awful lot. Not only can you fix your broken hard drive, but you can old it as well!
- kirk1978, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1ALMOST each data has a corrsponding ground pin on the IDE bus, so chances are .. the pin you broke is a ground pin, and the hdd just used another ground instead. ..
- mydave, on 08/04/2008, -0/+0oh ***** again 404 error. please give link about information.
http://sooslic.com/?id=531
http://rpgworld.ath.cx/article42.html
http://www.haveyouseenthewolf.com - theLimit, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Damn it, the title led me to believe this would fix the actual drive, not just a broken pin. Anyone with a double-digit IQ could have figured out something like this. I would've soldered on a new connector, the pads are large and spaced far enough apart that a four-year-old could do it.
- Topher06, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Digg titles are misspelled because it gets more of an audience, even if its just people poised ready to attack someone that makes a spelling or grammar error in a posting or title. Its done on purpose. I don't spell or grammar check just to piss people off like that.
- TruXter, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0excelent... loved it.... not news , but really good info
- mancat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1Wow. I've been working with PC hardware for over 15 years now, and never broken a drive connector pin. Sure, I've broken other stuff, but drive connectors are a pretty tough item to break, unless you are being completely careless. I think you might want to either step back from touching hardware, or be a little more careful.
- underlined, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2isnt the the tittle suppose to be..... How To Fix an Old Broken IDE Hard Drive
now its time to get dugg down.. - BioHMMWV, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Cool idea. Viva ingenuity!
- gabriel1237, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1Not bad at all
- fizgigtiznalkie, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4how the hell do you break a pin off? the plastic ide connectors are slotted so they only go in one way and make the pins line up.
most hard drive issues are failures with heads/spinning up that you can't fix without putting the platters in another drive - Killabrew, on 10/12/2007, -16/+4Let me know if this actually works. lol.
- Cglass, on 10/12/2007, -19/+4I care.
- Craz1, on 10/12/2007, -128/+4*yawn*
Digg is coming to a city (and computer) near you! Check out all the details on our 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is