How Can You Straighten HDD Pins?

racerx509 writes: "I just did something thats probably going to cost me much. I was reinstalling my hdd after trying to ghost the partition for another pc, when I jammed the cable in wrong. The cable is keyed and the keyed side was in correctlty, so I figured that it was going in right. However, I have severly bent several of the pins. The HDD will no longer detect even after I attempted to straighten the pins. Pin #11 has receded into the aperature and pins #15 and #16 are seriously bent. I've straightened them out with tweezers as much as I can, but it looks like this drive is gone. I would replace it, but i have some very important data on it. Does anyone know of a way I could straigten the pins and pull receded ones? If not, what about a good data recovery service in the Atlanta area?"

Comments

this happened to me....

[fist_187]

depending on what type of drive, of course, (some have pins that are less accessible than others), you can do this:

snip the end off of an old IDE cable and break (or dremel) the plastic off of the part of the drive that protects the pins. then you a steady hand or a friend who's good at precision soldering. you can solder each of the pins on the drive to the wires of the IDE cable.

then its just a matter of buying a new drive and connecting the 2 together and running
"xcopy /e /y c: d:"
to migrate the data. of course, you can still use the drive with the cable hard-wired, but i wouldnt rely on that for any real length of time.