[plug] Help needed ...

[Tim White]

>
> I used option 4 a few months ago: I sent Kevin a PCB for a broken 
> Seagate drive (4 years old) and got it back about 2 weeks later.  
> Attached it to the drive and away she went.  Perfect.  Kevin can 
> extract the firmware from the chip on your pcb and then re-flash a 
> similar (working) pcb with your firmware, thus making it compatible 
> with your drive.
>
> Personally, I would try options 3 or 4 before trying option 1 or 2.
>
> In then end, I guess it all depends on how valuable you data is.

If what you really need is Lucid, and didn't have much valuable data on 
it, and you can scrap the data on the drive, then your cheapest option 
is to take/send the drive back to place of purchase or WD. I'm much 
better at backing things up now days (and for all really important 
stuff, I'm using dropbox to automatically store my documents on the 
cloud, Ubuntu One has a similar thing). But I've lost data from a number 
of hard drives over the last few years. Some drives just died suddenly 
without warning. Again, a PCB issue but the cost of recover is just too 
much.
Its not really that hard to get a running system again with all your 
things installed, it's just a question of how important documents are 
that are on the drive.
Another odd thing, try waiting a little while with the drive not plugged 
in at all. Recently hard a motherboard chuck a wobbly for a week or two, 
thought it was the drive, took the drive out and put it in another 
computer and everything was fine. Now that motherboard is working fine 
too. But if you hear any grinding when you turn the drive on, then you 
really might just want to send the drive back for a replacement under 
warranty and just write the data off.

My 2c worth.

Tim