OT data recovery

Ahh multilayer board repairs... Brings back nightmares of training classes....

Here take this 10 level board that I just drilled 10 holes through and fix it....

Where are you getting the cap kits? I have a 620 myself and haven't really bothered to look around yet.

Reply to
Steve W.
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I can afford to repair this computer, I can't afford a new one. My last new computer was bought in 2000, before I was laid off, and put on disability. Too many repairs are needed around the house to waste money on another computer. Most of the software I use won't run under Vista,

7 or 8. Some is picky about running under XP. :(

The 275 watt power supply for the GX620 is a custom form factor for the SFF case.

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That is a used supply, new supplies start at $60.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

I did them on a daily basis for over four years, at Microdyne. Rework took too long to turn around boards, so I did my own.

Why do you want to scrap an entire run of boards, just because the board vendor left out the layer with the +/- 12 volt rails? Opamps don't work well without power.

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has the small form factor kit for $12. They alos sell the individual caps, if yours is different. You can buy small quantities of Panasonic FM or Rubycon MBZ series on Ebay.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

That's what "off lease" computers are good for. 3 year old Lenovo Think Centers with Core Duo processors and XP Pro anywhere from $69 to $100 in the SFF case, About $10 more for ATX form. P4 version SFF for about $50. Off lease Acers are a bit harder to come by, and off lease HP and Dell are everywhere, but I don't bother with them.

Reply to
clare

That wasn't the problem usually. Most of the repair I did was on board damage, either mechanical issues (like OOPs that screw was just a bit long, or electrical damage do to component failures burning traces inside the board.

OK, didn't pay attention to folks making kits. I buy caps in bulk then just grab the ones I need. Mine is in the tower case but still runs pretty warm.

Reply to
Steve W.

A board like that would be scrapped at the factory. They didn't like ECOs that required jumpers, and only did it rarely.

I buy bulk from Digikey, and am putting a small order together, right now. I was ready to order when the Optiplex died, and all the details are on it's SATA hard drive so I'm going to pull it and put it into an external housing to see if it survived. Luckily, I still have one on hand.

The drives run very hot in the smaller cases, due to limited airflow. The other problem is the low profile slots. I needed a couple extra USB ports for things that didn't like hubs so I had to buy them on Ebay, then wait for a slow boat from China to get them. The first order was canceled & refunded, because the entire production run was defective. Luckily, the next run was OK.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

If the information is THAT mission critical, a desktop class machine isn't going to do it alone, even with mirrored drives - you need to go to something far more robust like an AIX Unix based machine running a Journaled File System.

The Data Recovery Services that tear the dead hard drive down in a Clean Room and put the platters in a good donor drive to get the information off are going to charge you over a grand for that service

- sometimes several grand, and no guarantees of success.

For one day's sales data you might be better off just doing the reconstruction the hard way, from the paper timecards, the Truck shipping Bills Of Lading and UPS shipment records, and the paper copies of the day's invoices. You *do* make paper copies for just this reason, right?

If you don't, see what you can recover from the Cloud and the customers who placed orders that day. Your e-mails and other things will still be on the servers and can be rebuilt.

Dig the carbons out of the trash can and hold them up to the light. Get out the cash register journal tape and glean what you can from that - at least you can get the totals, and back-figure sales from that.

Call the credit card clearinghouse and get copies of everything they did before they do the 72-hour purge to prevent ID Theft. It's like a Jigsaw Puzzle, once the pattern emerges it'll all fall into place.

Get started now, then you can check all the source info you collected against the other pieces of the puzzle and/or against the hard drive contents if they do get it back.

There are a few customers who will (given that option) say "No, we only ordered one dozen bushels yesterday, not one gross!" - but those are the kinds of customers you really didn't want to do business with anyway. Lose their phone number, and develop amnesia if they come back looking for another fantastic deal like that.

The honest ones will help you get the records rebuilt and make things right with you even if you can't prove it from your end.

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Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman (munged human readable)

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