Digital Camera Repair Blog

My wife is a digital designer with a large national company and is a Photoshop guru. What she does on the computer is amazing! She has created amazing works of art from snapshots of our own as well as for many others as a small side business.

She is awesome with software and I’m not; but on the other hand I’m awesome with hardware and she’s not, so we work together perfectly.

The other day while hooking up her portable USB drive, the solder points for the USB port broke right off! At that moment she realized she hadn’t backed up the data on that drive for quite some time and was going to lose a great deal of important files if she was unable to reconnect to the drive. She wasn’t too happy at this point thinking about all those lost hours of work, that’s for sure!

Usually this is where I would step in to help… but I didn’t know about the problem as of yet.

She spent some time trying to find information online about how to recover the information from the drive and found a post saying to just put the drive in a new external enclosure. Sounded easy enough, so she looked for a screwdriver to open up the housing and take it apart.

Unfortunately when taking out the screws on the enclosure one of them stripped, so she wasn’t able to get it open. Ah ha! Finally she HAD to ask for my assistance, and bounding to the rescue I came! I drilled out the stripped screw and opened up the hard drive housing like a champ. TA DA! See, we men are good for something afterall.

Upon opening the housing we found the portable drive consisted of nothing more than a normal laptop SATA hard drive and a small board that changed the input/output and power from SATA to USB. The USB connector had simple broken it’s solder points and come off and needed to be soldered back on. No big deal. My hands are too shakey to solder very well so it was going to have to wait till Monday.

We did do a quick experiment by lining up the broken solder points on the USB port with the board and taping it down securely with electrical tape, but to no avail. The drive would spin up, but we couldn’t access it through the computer.

In the meantime before I could get it resoldered by one of my employees in my digital camera repair business, she started looking for cheap replacement external enclosures that come without a drive. She found one for only about $12 and happily snapped it up. She quickly and easily installed the drive in it at home in no time and crossing our fingers, we plugged it in. Voila! The drive sprang to life, up popped the window showing the contents and she was back in business.

Once the drive was working once again, backups were made of all her important files to her laptop, my external drive on my computer, and post-it notes that were then stuck to the fridge with magnets… Gee, I hope the magnets don’t damage any of the data… Not a smart backup plan that one I don’t think.

Now that her business had been brought back from the brink of destruction all was well again with the world.

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