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Killed two vintage 2.5 inch hard drives due to my own stupidity

paul.brett

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 20, 2007
Messages
376
Location
Wisbech, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, UK
I am 'upgrading' a couple of old laptops. One is a Compaq LTE5000 and the other is a Toshiba 220CS.

Compaq LTE5000 specs:
Pentium 75Mhz
8MB RAM
2GB CF Hard Drive
Windows 95

Toshiba 220CS specs:
Pentium 133Mhz
32MB RM
512MB CF Hard Drive
Windows 98SE

What I'm doing is removing the mechanical hard drives, and replacing them with IDE to CF adaptes and re-using a couple of old CF cards I have lying around.

The upgrades went well, but the problem came when I tried to transfer the data from the old drives, using an IDE to USB adapter on my modern PC. The plan was to plug the recently formatted and known booting CF cards into the multi-card reader, and then simply copy the data across. The IDE to USB adapter is not well laballed, and I managed to put the IDE connector on backwards, therefore supplying power to the wrong pins. It wouldn't be so bad if I had done it to only one drive, but in my haste, I did it to both drives before I realised what I was doing wrong.

As it is, I have done a clean install of Windows 95 to the LTE, and Windows 98SE to the Tosh. Both are working well, and I am pleased with the speed improvement. I guess it should also improve the battery life.

Rant over. *breathe*

Have a great day.
 
My deepest regrets. If it makes you feel any better, you can pretend the hard drives would go click, click anyway once you were trying to duplicate them. I've had that happen to a good handful of 2.5" hard drives.
 
Ouch! Sorry to rear this. Usually whenever I plug in an older drive (and newer ones), they just won't spin up at all if they're plugged in wrong. But it seems in your case you got the bad end of the deal.
 
I've done the same thing with inexpensive 2.5" to 3.5" adapters. Since the 2.5" drives draw their power from the single connector, plugging it in the wrong way sends power down some of the data lines and usually ends up frying the HD's board. :( I hope there was not any data on those drives. Having to re-install from scratch is much better than losing data.

Sorry to hear it all went so badly.

Heather
 
Been there too, and while it sucks, its not like you killed some REALLY OLD or irreplaceable one of a kind proprietary interface drive though (though the data loss may be more catastrophic than the loss of the drive).

I would be much more pissed if I killed an apple Profile or Widget drive, or an MFM/RLL, or PS/2 EDSI, all of which which get rarer to find working every passing day.
 
If there's data on those drives that you really need, you might post the make and model numbers of those drives on the off chance that someone has an identical drive from which you could take the pcb. I know I've got a drive from an LTE5000 somewhere, for instance.
 
If there's data on those drives that you really need, you might post the make and model numbers of those drives on the off chance that someone has an identical drive from which you could take the pcb. I know I've got a drive from an LTE5000 somewhere, for instance.
Agreed, I doubt either one is a real rare model, I am sure many of us have stacks of similar vintage drives, I have upgraded MANY similar LTE/Armada laptops over the years and undoubtedly have at least a few of those old drives around.
 
If there's data on those drives that you really need, you might post the make and model numbers of those drives on the off chance that someone has an identical drive from which you could take the pcb. I know I've got a drive from an LTE5000 somewhere, for instance.

Not at all. I'm just pissed at my own stupitity. The IDE to CF adapters are working very well.
 
Not at all. I'm just pissed at my own stupitity.
Don't be. It happens to us all. These days, I just put it down to being over 50.

Whilst working on an IBM 5170 type 1 motherboard, I inserted two banks of RAM - that's 36 of the 'piggyback' 4128 RAM chips. Unfortunately they all went in the wrong way. 36 RAM chips destroyed. Not only have I done that that once, I've done it twice. From that, I can tell you that the Mostek version of the RAM chip tolerates incorrect orientation, but the TI version of the chip never does.
 
Think of it as a good thing, you didn't burn up a motherboard. Last time I was playing with a Pentium Single Board Computer I plugged in the 2.5" HDD backwards (on a ribbon cable) and ended up burning up the hard drive and motherboard. That was FUN.
 
Sounds like there's enough bad experience on this thread to round up a Class Action against the idiots who decided that the 2.5" drive interface didn't need keying like (most) 3.5" IDE connectors.

I haven't burned any drive controllers yet, but I have burned up a 2.5>3.5 adapter by the same error. Some drives don't even have Pin1 marked in any visible way!

On second thoughts, forget about the Class Action. I had a vision of a herd of vintage computer enthusiasts shuffling through a courtroom trying to explain why it wasn't our fault...:wallbang:

Rick
 
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