Recent content by SilverPuppy

Success! Long and winding road that I'm sure my client wished would have taken less time. First I tried to recover the contents of IC602 using ICSP with a moderately-priced 866A USB programmer only to discover it didn't support ICSP on SPI25 chips. After feeling totally betrayed that an ICSP...

I see no reason why you should become angry over this, but you very definitely seem to be. Basically you're telling me that my understanding of how hard drives work is stuck in the 1980s (when I first started dealing with them....I can tell you in great detail how FM and MFM drives work) and...

Thanks for the help everyone. Sorry for appearing to have not paid attention to your diagrams and such; I was a little confused, basically because I've been sick and apparently forgotten how to count. :roll: My boards are USB and as such some of the solder points are in a little different place...

They have (compared to any of us) unlimited resources if the need presents itself. Theoretically it wouldn't be difficult to construct a machine which would spin up the motor, move the heads slowly across the platters, and parse any valid data which resulted. It would have to be adaptable to...

You're a hero. You didn't specify where to put the vcc wire though, so I'll have to figure it out. (Although if 3, 7, and 8 are joined at the board why would that be needed?) Water-damaged board won't power up. I'm hoping to read the water-damaged one this way and maybe even write it to the new...

I'm being a little facetious. Basically I'm referring to the type of rig the FBI uses to scrounge data straight off the platters without the drive firmware being involved at all. I have no idea what it would cost to build/buy such a rig.

I guess the days of uniform drive geometry are over, then. At one time the platters were used the same way in every drive in the family, and frankendriving was much easier. Of course, 4TB on one drive was just a pipe dream. Trade-offs have obviously had to be made somewhere. Thanks for the...

Wow. I do not understand why Toshiba made the decision to make their hard drives such unique precious snowflakes that without the adaptive data stored in a flash ROM the thing is altogether helpless. I feel certain that with enough money thrown at it, the data could still be recovered manually...

So I'm about to do the same thing. Have a water-damaged board and a donor board. The USB drive was left in the rain. :roll: I had hoped that I could get away with not swapping the IC602, but of course it wouldn't initialize the drive. It did at least spin and move the heads, sounding healthy...