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A question about hot swapping harddisks

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First post, by Peter Swinkels

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When taking apart an old (from ~2003) digital satellite reciever I found a 160gb Seagate IDE harddisk inside. Being curious about any data that might still on it I decided to plug it into the hot swap bay in the front of my computer. When the computer is turned on, it shuts down immediately. When I insert the hdd before turning the computer on it is simply not detected. There is a jumper set to "cable select". Removing it has not effect.

I normally have a 160gb Western Digital IDE harddisk from around 2009 plugged in the hot swap bay and it works perfectly fine. Removing and reinserting it while the computer is turned causes no problems.

My motherboard doesn't appear to have any connectors for IDE drives, so the hot swap bay is the only place where I can connect an IDE drive.

My computer:
1. Motherboard: MEDIONPC MS-7728 (CPU 1)
2. Processor type and speed: Intel Core i7 2600 @ 3.40GHz - Sandy Bridge 32nm Technology
3. Amount and type of RAM: 8,00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-9-9-24)
4. Video board w/ RAM amount and type: SyncMaster (1600x900@60Hz) 1024MB ATI AMD Radeon HD 7450 (Elitegroup)
5. Sound board: AMD High Definition Audio Device
6. Operating system: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1 (English)

I personally suspect that the harddisk doesn't support hot swapping or that it has failed. Any suggestions as to what I could try?

Last edited by Peter Swinkels on 2014-07-06, 15:41. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 1 of 6, by h-a-l-9000

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From my memory some of these sattelite devices used a different, incompatible firmware so they needn't pay the ATA license fees.
Did it still work when it was in the receiver?

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Reply 2 of 6, by Peter Swinkels

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As far as I know it still did work in the reciever. It hadn't been used for quite a while. Although I was careful enough not to damage the harddisk, what is left of the reciever can't be reassembled to test the drive. I think it was a Dolby Digital reciever from 2003 which was used to recieve British satellite tv if that helps. I would have to look for what is left of it to be certain.

Is there any way to check what firmware the disk uses?

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Reply 3 of 6, by Stiletto

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Word of warning: if you're serious about data recovery, assuming you can get an OS to detect the drive, either don't use Windows (Linux is a much better choice for data recovery) or get one of those inline write-block things for your drive(s). Windows likes to auto-mount and futz with the filesystem when it detects your drive. It will WRITE to the drive, changing the info on it.

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Reply 4 of 6, by Peter Swinkels

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I'm not really serious about data recovery, just curious. Any way the Satellite reciever was a Sky+ box. On the front it also says "Dolby Digital" and on the back "Thomson"

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Reply 5 of 6, by nforce4max

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HDA2 is a program that will unlock drives taken from DVRs and other satellite receivers, some of those receivers have programs for windows that allows you to recover the content that is stored on those drives but Direct TV is the big exception (the programs exist but rare).

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Reply 6 of 6, by Peter Swinkels

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nforce4max wrote:

HDA2 is a program that will unlock drives taken from DVRs and other satellite receivers, some of those receivers have programs for windows that allows you to recover the content that is stored on those drives but Direct TV is the big exception (the programs exist but rare).

Thanks for the reply. I've looked for HDA2 using Google but I can't find it. Does any one know if and where I can download the firmware for the harddisk? It's a 160gb Seagate drive, model ST3160022ACE.

Also, I've noticed that my BIOS won't detect this harddisk, I'm beginning to suspect it's dead.

EDIT:
I found HDA2, at http://hdat2.com. It's called HDAT2.

EDIT 2:
HDA2 doesn't detect the harddisk. It's dead. I give up.

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Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
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