Seriously don’t! I had no real other choice and luckily got away with it. What’s that? Story time: As always, it is a good idea to keep backups. When you work off a notebook, hard drive space might become an issue and you begin outsourcing files to your backup drive with no other backup in place. THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA. People do that anyway. I do, still, not a good idea.
Hardware dies when you can least afford to lose it (for money and what’s on the hardware), but it still dies. When the digital library drive died I had to make sure to get back all data. Unfortunately, no computer would recognize the drive anymore. No Mac, no PC - tough luck. It spun like usual and made no discomforting sounds, but wouldn’t let a computer talk to it.
If you have a genius among your friends, they might have good ideas. Bafi suggested buying another drive from the same series and exchanging the external logic board. Sounds scary?—Hell yeah! But what was I to do? I bought one marked as probably defect and of course it was defect. It made terrible screeching noises when turned on.
Still, I changed the logic boards. It sounds as the most scary thing to do but all there was to it was loosening four torx screws and unplugging a flat cable; two times off, one time on again. It took around a minute and I was really surprised to realize that that was all I could do.
After reassembling the drive in it’s external hard drive case and setting up the backup (backup backup that is) drive—in case my attempt worked, I wanted to save as much data as I could immediately—I turned on the drive, waiting anxiously for any results. Nothing happened. All tension left me at once and disappointment started creeping up.
I re-checked everything and found a power connector unconnected. As fast as my fingers would let me I reconnected the unconnected power connector and turned on the drive for real. It spun up. So far so good. It made the usual “I am going to be mounted” noises, so far so good. THEN IT APPEARED IN THE FINDER. IT WORKED! I started duplicating all its contents to the spare drive and after 45 minutes everything was safe again.
Lesson learned hard:
- DO HAVE BACKUPS FOR THE DATA YOU CARE ABOUT
- NO EXCEPTIONS
- It turns out to be good to have a genius as a friend