Workin' Here Boss
This is one of those parenthetical posts - stuff that I dig that probably matters not a whit to anyone else. But I post anyway. Pbbblllttt!
A friend of mine has/had an external hard drive that went south. Opening it up seems the thing to do but the case was remarkably monolithic. At least in appearance. I did a little online research which seemed to indicate that there were clips that could be loosened with a long blade slipped down inside the case. I passed that info on. I was wrong. I really needed to see the darn thing, hold it in my moist and delicate hands. Well, I got the thing delivered to me.
I've got to say, there was some kinda main force applied to the back cover of the drive - it was all bent outta shape. But still attached. What caught my eye, though, was a little sticker on the bottom that said something on the order of "removing this sticker voids warranty." Why would that be? I mused. Followed immediately by the realization that the warranty wasn't really the problem.
So I scraped the sticker off to reveal a pair of little screw heads. Aha! indeed. Unscrewing them allowed the guts of the drive to slide right out, easy peasy. Whereupon I proceeded to take down the internals to component parts which importantly consisted of two 500GB Seagate drives.
I then ordered a couple of external drive enclosures and have tried one drive in one new enclosure but it booted neither on my iMac, nor on my friend's PC. The idea was, of course, to rescue the data on the drive/s and then set them up as a couple of external drives as needed. But my enthusiasm for the project obscured my gathering basic background info. To wit: the original problem was actually that the power supply would not plug in properly. The drive had a four-pin socket and I saw that the problem (which I could have solved before removing anything) was that one of the pins had been pushed out of position and stopped the plug from seating. I gingerly tried to move the pin to its full upright and seat back position but it had been wiggled enough that it just broke off at that point.
Sigh.
What do I do, what do I do? Go to the maker's website of course and after spending an inordinate amount of time peering at the power supplies they offer, finding what I truly believe is the right one. So, harking back to the post title, what have I been doing this afternoon? Reassembling a naked hard drive so that when I get the power supply, I can boot this sucker up and get at all the good bits. And bytes. Workin' here boss. Makin' more work for myself than I really should but, hey. Workin' here, boss.