Thrilling story time~
A lady living next door mentioned to me that she'd lost many photos of her late husband when her old laptop died. I asked if she considered taking the hard drive out of the laptop to recover the photos. She told me she did not know she could do that, and, moreover, a person at the computer shop told her there was no guarantee the data could be recovered, and it would cost a lot of money.
Long story short, I took the hard drive out of her old laptop and tried to connect it to our home computer. The disk didn't power up.
I looked closer and noticed signs of rust on the disk's board. The situation seemed a biiit hopeless.
But my fiancee washed the board in alcohol and removed the busted capacitor that caused a short between VCC and GND... and the disk powered up.
It is not working well (it keeps complaining about stuff on the dmesg board), but it works well enough to copy gigabytes of photos stored on it.
Happy end~
