Help, D430 Hard Drive Failure

We've got 2 D430's in house and they are awesome. One of them just had the hard drive stop working and it was confirmed by swapping drives between the two systems. These have a 2.5" proprietary connection and Dell is telling me that there is no way to access the drive to potentially recover the data since its not a standard PATA interface. It's got some really small ribbon connector on the drive that hooks into a custom connection to the D430.

Does anyone have any ideas, or familiarity with how we can get access to this drive so we can run some utilities on it? Dell seems to be of little help here and the D430 simply doesn't recognize the drive at all. I'm not sure I would have bought these systems knowing that this was a potential issue.

Any help or suggestions would be most appreciated. I'm hoping there is some know interface that will allow the drive to hook into a standard PATA connection to recover data.

Thanks!

Drew

 

Is this the type of adaptor you are looking for?

John

 

Hard drives do fail, it's pretty rare these days, but I wouldn't call it an issue with any particular laptop.

Greg

 

Actually hard drives are the most common component to fail in computer equipment. Has to do with the fact that they're mechanical. They are fairly reliable but not foolproof by any means. That's why we do backups.

John, your link is right on the money. The Dell drive uses a ZIF connector. That adapter is pricey though and likely can be had on eBay for about half price if looked for.

Drew, I assume you have no backups and therefore need to do this?

 

Wow. Impressed. Thanks!

 

u gotta ask the pros to recover data from a dead hard drive.
is it the hard drive pata 1.8" 4200 rpm.

 

Yes. That is correct. I'm still not sure of the exact ZIF connector. The hard drive may or may not be dead. It very well could be the Dell connector that is broke and a simple ZIF connector could bring the drive back to life.

Does anyone have the exact connector -- confirmed. -- that would work with this 1.8" 4200 rpm drive?

Thanks

Drew

 

I understand that HDD's are still the most unreliable component of a computer, but in recent years they have gotten much more reliable than their equivilents from the turn of the century.

Greg

 

Just in case you haven't bought it yet, this adapter should work, it isn't SATA to PATA. It's just a 1.8" PATA to 3.5" PATA connector. And it's about $6 including shipping worldwide.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.15506

 

That connector is different than the one on the D430 hard drive. The D420/D430 have a ribbon cable as opposed to female pins.

It does look like that same site has them available.