Hacking External hard drive died

[CanIHazWarez]

Years and years ago, I had my Wii hacked and was using an external hard drive to store all my games. I had it set up to boot directly to the Wii Flow screen (I think that's what it was). The hard drive died while I was using another partition, hooked up to my PC. I haven't touched it since. I'm thinking about getting it out of my attic.
A) are my saves still safe on the system or did they die with my hard drive?
B) what else besides the games were stored on the hard drive that would need replaced to get things up and running?
C) is the fact that it was set to boot straight into Wii Flow going to be an issue?

 

[godreborn]

A) I think saves will depend on if you were using emunand that was stored on the hdd or semi emulation for saves.
B) I think most things that are important are on the sd card other than uneek, games, possibly saves if the previous answer is yes.
C) I'm not sure.

 

[FAST6191]

How did the drive die?
Quite often such drives only have the reader component kick the bucket and the hard drive itself (which is usually just a normal hard drive, though some ones a bit later in time did do something else) be fine.

 

[CanIHazWarez]

How did the drive die?
Quite often such drives only have the reader component kick the bucket and the hard drive itself (which is usually just a normal hard drive, though some ones a bit later in time did do something else) be fine.

If I recall correctly, I believe the motor died. It didn't experience any hard drops, it just quit working one day. I still have it, but I assume it would be a ludicrous amount of money to extract the data.

 

[FAST6191]

If I recall correctly, I believe the motor died. It didn't experience any hard drops, it just quit working one day. I still have it, but I assume it would be a ludicrous amount of money to extract the data.

That can just as easily be an internal voltage twiddler died on the case side of things (not enough energy to spin the drive up, especially if it is that little bit older and the grease that bit thicker) and putting it into a new shell will see it spring back to life.

If it is actually a dead motor then yeah platter transfer or maybe motor transfer, either way happening in a clean room and likely requiring someone to find a similar (if not identical down to batch) model, and that is the sort of thing you typically pay up for.

For the sake of a $10 sata/ide adapter (that you can probably put to use or straight into your magic PC fixing kit) and a few minutes with a screwdriver I do like to check. Said $10 might even be able to be skipped if you have another external you can borrow for a few minutes or a PC you can shove it in.

 

[CanIHazWarez]

That can just as easily be an internal voltage twiddler died on the case side of things (not enough energy to spin the drive up, especially if it is that little bit older and the grease that bit thicker) and putting it into a new shell will see it spring back to life.

If it is actually a dead motor then yeah platter transfer or maybe motor transfer, either way happening in a clean room and likely requiring someone to find a similar (if not identical down to batch) model, and that is the sort of thing you typically pay up for.

For the sake of a $10 sata/ide adapter (that you can probably put to use or straight into your magic PC fixing kit) and a few minutes with a screwdriver I do like to check. Said $10 might even be able to be skipped if you have another external you can borrow for a few minutes or a PC you can shove it in.

Thank you for the wisdom, sir. I will probably give that a shot. I just assumed it was a lost cause.

 

[CanIHazWarez]

@FAST6191 You sir, are a gentleman and a scholar. I took the hard drive out of the enclosure and stuck it in my desktop. It's working! All the data that I thought had been lost for YEARS is there. I copied a game from the Wii partition to a thumb drive and the UBS loading worked and it seems that my saves are still there. This could not have turned out any better. Thanks again!

 

[FAST6191]

Glad it is working. I assume you already backed up everything you would struggle to otherwise replace -- we will skip all the various scenarios but I have seen last gasps before.