What I Learned After An Assumed Hard Drive Crash - Part 4 of 5

Testing a Suspect Hard Drive Using a Docking Station

At this stage, I knew that I needed to determine which was at fault, the:

• Hard drive or ...
  
• Motherboard / system board.

Since I didn't have another compatible SATA hard drive available, another approach was called for. As those little gray cells were firing neurons in my brain, I recalled a brochure that I had half-heartedly flipped through about a week ago. They say the brain remembers everything even when we're not paying close attention. That's when the phrase "hard drive docking stations" came to mind. Docking stations are now available that allow an internal hard drive to be "read" without actually being installed in a PC.

I hadn't used a hard drive docking station before, yet the idea seemed worth exploring further. Since I'm not a fan of junk mail, the original brochure had already been sent to the recycle bin, yet I remembered the web address: A few minutes later, using my standby PC, I checked out Maplin.co.uk and found the perfect model of docking station.

After reading the description online, at only £27 (about $45 at that time), this seemed like a quick, simple and cost effective way to determine whether the hard drive from my notebook PC was intact, or not. Why: I would simply insert the suspect SATA hard drive into the docking station, then connect its USB lead into a spare USB socket on my standby PC. If the hard drive was fine, then I should be able to access the files both for reading and writing, proving that the hard drive was either OK or at least not completely damaged.

Two days later, the docking station arrived. After reading the easy instructions, I carefully plugged the 2.5" suspect SATA hard drive into the docking station and switched the docking station power button on. I then powered up my standby PC and once it had completed the boot up sequence, I connected the docking station USB lead to the PC.

Result: all files could be read normally and I could save a small test file to the hard drive plugged into the docking station: wonderful! So the suspect hard drive did not appear to be at fault after all. So what was left? Answer: the keyboard and the system board.

Although the keyboard could be faulty, since the HP PC was almost 3 years old, I felt that the failure was more likely to be on the motherboard / system board, since that is where most heat activity is concentrated within a PC. Also, until the PC failure, I had not experienced any keys sticking or keyboard problems. So at that stage, I estimated that the system board was indeed the culprit.

More importantly, the hard drive worked perfectly allowing me to recover all the information and make another backup. Yes, the notebook PC motherboard / system board looks like it had failed but that was something to consider for another day. Right now, we had an ideal result: complete data recovery!

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