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Recovering Data from Conner CP-2124 HDD

S

Skii Squad

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Feb 16, 2014
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Yesterday I managed to salvage a hard disk from an old Toshiba Satellite T1900 (circa 1993). The laptop belonged to my mother who used it while working on her doctorate in Chicago. The Hard Disk contains very valuable information including her entire dissertation which was needed to graduate. For reasons I wont bother to bore you with, it's crucial that the information on this drive be recovered by any means. I am aware professional recovery experts exist, but I thought id try my best to recover the information myself before having to spend a fortune on someone else to do it.

The Drive is a Conner Peripherals CP-2124 Hard Disk claiming to have about 128 MBs on it. I've included some pictures i took of the drive below:



So far I've been able to connect the drive to my computer using an IDE to USB adapter. Once i power on the device however im greeted with a strange sound that lasts for a brief moment and then is never heard again. I've gone to the trouble of recording this sound which i will provide via a youtube clip i have uploaded:

Windows refuses to read the drive at all and upon further inspection with device manager, the disk reads as having 0 bytes:


I also tried to get a response from the drive using Parted Magic (a linux disro) that OS read the drive as having 2TB. When trying to access the drive, linux gave me an "input/output" error.

So what do you guys think? is there hope for this little guy, or am i gonna have to send it to an expert?
Any Suggestions are welcome :)
 
First thought: are you using a powered ide-to-usb adapter? The ones powered only by the usb bus usually can't deliver enough power for such old drives.
 
You probably can't access a drive of that type on a modern Windows computer via a USB adapter. I know I can't. :) But if you plug it in to an older computer that used a drive of that type natively you should probably be able to read it. A 386, 486 or Pentium should do nicely.
 
Another issue unrelated to whether or not the drive works...I bought a USB to IDE adapter a few years back to disk wipe some old disks...and found that it wouldn't recognize anything under 2Gb for whatever reason. Could easily be that even if the drive works, your adapter won't.

Wesley
 
I strongly suspect that the IDE-to-USB adapter requires a drive that is LBA-capable. I believe that the 2124 only speaks CHS addressing.

Try it on a computer with a real IDE interface.
 
If you're willing to ship it, I'm more than happy to have a look at pulling the data for you gratis. I run a forensics company. :)
 
Stone said:
You probably can't access a drive of that type on a modern Windows computer via a USB adapter. I know I can't. :) But if you plug it in to an older computer that used a drive of that type natively you should probably be able to read it. A 386, 486 or Pentium should do nicely.
Click to expand...

+1 - I agree
 
i've the same issue with a Connor CP30084E, ide to usb adapter is not working (they told me to try it on windows xp, but no way). the hard disk sound is the same in the video, but there is just a louder ticking when the hard drive turns on (not 3 as in this video)
windows recognizes in the same way of this thread (but it takes longer, here is very fast as we can listen to the windows sound).

it was inside a olivetti m300-02 (386). i think this computer got some problems with cpu/mobo, so i can't use the disk on it. is something i can try? at the moment I do not have a 386/486 to try
 
connected to and old ide interface, old pentium 100, not detected.
so i opened the hard drive, it was well rotating, but the reading head was like blocked, i just pushed a little the head and it started to work again, now the drive is detected automatically!
magic!
 
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