My father had been on the hunt for his digital photos from my parents' Italy trip in 2003, We managed to track them down to a. some backup CDs that were approximately that old and b. a former internal hard drive that we had put inside an external drive enclosure which was last touched around 2008, whose power adapter had been lost.
The other day, I went over with the box of CDs I had found. After the recent SSD upgrade to his desktop system, the optical drive had been unplugged, so I switched the system off, plugged the optical drive back into the motherboard, and rebooted. No real issues there, and we were able to find the files within a disc or two.
This left the external HDD. I found an appropriate power adapter from another external HDD I had and well, we had powered it on for a few minutes, but then it seemed as if it never detected the drive. This was a bit frustrating, so even though we had found some of the files on the CDs, I took the external HDD back to "my workshop" here at home.
Now, as luck would have it, the drive was a Maxtor 250GB IDE hard drive from 2003. That jogged a memory loose: one of my former employers had got a steal of a deal on refurbished Maxtor 250GB IDE drives back around 2004-ish. They had all been of the same age, many from the same batch, with the same model numbers and part numbers, and all with the same firmware. I remembered that I had taken a chance on buying a refurbished hard drive and purchased at least two drives: one for myself and one for my father's computer. The one for myself, I ended up not using right away, so it sat in its antistatic bag and gathered dust - for at least a decade.
So, taking my father's Maxtor in my hands, I turned it over and noticed that there was some bubbling in the ceramic, and a little scorching, on one of the chips of the controller board. Not surprising - don't power on a fifteen year old hard drive for a while, things can happen, especially in an enclosure like that. Still - could it be that simple? I took my old-but-unused Maxtor drive, noticed the security screws it used, found my security screwdriver bit set, removed its controller board, removed the drive controller board from my dad's drive, and swapped boards, replacing its controller.
Now, I knew there's often a little ROM on the controller board that contains settings and ideally you would unsolder this ROM and solder it onto the replacement board, which starts becoming beyond my skillset - those surface-mount ROMs are TINY - but I took my chances that this drive was old enough that that wouldn't be an issue. If it did not fix the problem, I'd call time of death, and we'd either ship it off for professional data recovery, or not bother...
Success!
Perhaps it was a failure of that chip, perhaps the generic AC adapter used with the drive enclosure flaked out and surged it, maybe Dad had plugged the wrong power adapter into the enclosure at some point - it's hard to say. But after surgery, it decided to work with the same power adapter I'd used previously, not the one that came with the enclosure, which is still lost.
At any rate, I was able to retrieve all of the files off the drive, and headed to his house to drop it off.
"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen
Stiletto