pcasciola
29th of January 2006 (Sun), 13:12
I dodged a big bullet this week. I carelessly shorted out the circuit board on a brand new 250Gb hard drive, at a point where I temporarily had no backup since I was moving hardware around and rebuilding my entire machine. This was not critical data which I do have quadruple backups of, but stuff I'd rather not lose nonetheless. Completely dead. Not spinning up, not recognized by the external USB case or system BIOS when hooked directly to the onboard IDE controller.
I went back to CompUSA, bought the identical drive, and swapped circuit boards from one to the other, despite several recovery places saying this will not work and could render the data unrecoverable.
Well, I'm happy to say it does in fact work, even though the two boards I have are slightly different revisions. It took about a minute to swap circuit boards after buying a $3 T-9 Torx driver, and all connections are by contacts (no plugs, no soldered wires). I just finished copying all the important data off of the drive. Whew!!!
I figured I'd pass on the info in case anyone is faced with a completely dead drive that is often just the result of a dead circuit board. Based on the research I did this week, it seems a large percentage of the failures are for this exact reason. Just make sure not to use any old random circuit board, and try and find as close a revision to the one on the dead drive. I saved myself at least $500, and ended up with another 250Gb drive for $70, which will be a mirror of this data as soon as Maxtor replaces the dead one under warranty.
I went back to CompUSA, bought the identical drive, and swapped circuit boards from one to the other, despite several recovery places saying this will not work and could render the data unrecoverable.
Well, I'm happy to say it does in fact work, even though the two boards I have are slightly different revisions. It took about a minute to swap circuit boards after buying a $3 T-9 Torx driver, and all connections are by contacts (no plugs, no soldered wires). I just finished copying all the important data off of the drive. Whew!!!
I figured I'd pass on the info in case anyone is faced with a completely dead drive that is often just the result of a dead circuit board. Based on the research I did this week, it seems a large percentage of the failures are for this exact reason. Just make sure not to use any old random circuit board, and try and find as close a revision to the one on the dead drive. I saved myself at least $500, and ended up with another 250Gb drive for $70, which will be a mirror of this data as soon as Maxtor replaces the dead one under warranty.