Sniff, sniff whats that burning smell?

LizardKing

LizardKing

LizardKing

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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My HD decide to cook itself, unfortunatly its holding 250gb + of files.
What do you reakon the chances are of getting a 2nd one of the same model and swapping the PCB's over and recovering the data?
Its a Seagate 7200.10
The only issue i can see is the motor's flat power leads are soldered directly onto the board, though i'm quite handy with a soldering iron.

You can see the burnt out chip at the bottom right.
12072008072cg0.jpg
 
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damn ul dude.

unless there is a way you can swap, I dont think you can retreive the data lost ( I hope for you I am wrong obv) a mate of mine had the same problem a few years ago, and he either had to pay 500 pounds to get it retreived or buy a new one and do his essays all over again.
 
Chance is very high, most that get sent to data recovery places simply have a blown logic board. Place swaps it out (they keep loads of different ones on hand) and charges you an arm and a leg for the privilege.
 
Depends if the blown board took any internal components with it when it died. But I'd say you have a pretty good chance - certainly worth trying if the data on it is worth anything to you.
 
That good to hear :)
The drive is still in warranty but for the price of a 2nd hand drive and a new hd should it fail is worth it.
 
If you get another HD the same as that one and swap the controller boards over then you stand a good chance of recovering all the data.

Also you won't have to solder anything, that ribbon cable will have a connector on the back side of the controller.
 
done it before a couple of times now, direct pcb swap worked, and once i even used a pcb with different firmware from original one and it still managed to get all my data off the drive.

all i can say is give it a go, either way the drive is scrap to you and i doubt its worth paying the recovery places to retrieve the data so you may as well give it a go yourself.
if you chuk it away as it is then you will always have that thought in your head that what if you did the pcb swap and it worked?

do try and get the same pcb for it, shoudl be fairly simple, and give it a shot.
 
Think of it this way: How different is the hard drive underneath? SATA II HD will be no different from a SATA I HD, it's just the interface with the computer that's different.

IIRC, Seagate don't even make their own boards, they buy them in from the firmware manufacturer.
 
No I havn't tried emailing them, might be an idea. However browsing through the forums at deadharddrive, it seems the model I happened to have bought is notorious for failing which I why i'm having trouble tracking down the PCB.
 
Managed to source a very similar PCB from the ebay shop for £30 delivered, Hard drive is now functioning :D
Now do i make a backup of everything and swap back to the broken PCB and RMA it.
 
If you smell burning id guess that if the PCB that cooked, we used to swap PCB's out all the time when I worked for an OEM to make working drives (we used to save all the out of warranty drive for a few months then see how many we could make work and sell them) ... every drive we had (maxtor, ibm, seagate) it was possible to remove the PCB.. setting asside the warranty issue on the new drive assuming you can get *** same make and model it might work!
 
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