Hard drive fire...yes fire !

[fatharock]

One of my drives caught fire, and the other 3 won't spin any longer.
I've never heard of this happening, ever.

The power supply also is toast. I suspect this caused the meltdown.
Anyone agree or have other theories?

Your input is apreciated,

Fr

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Without any information on the context of the fire, it's hard to say.

I can't imagine the hard drive itself catching fire. There's nothing inside that would spontaneously catch on fire.

My guess would be the fire started in or near the CPU.

[Geek-9pm]

Yes, the PSU failed and destroyed your hard drives.
It is tare. But does happen.  When the controller chip in the PSU fails, it cansend  over1000 watts  at high voltage into all components.
Also, everything may be damaged, even the mouse. And external devices.
If the PSU had a UL or equivalent rating, your insurance company should buy you a new commuter.

Of course, I was not there. You have to judge for yourself. Here are reference stat may help  you decide.
keywords: massive PC power supply failures
http://www.ehow.com/list_7250140_causes-computer-power-supply-failure.html
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Comp/comp.sys.mac.advocacy/2006-02/msg01556.html
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/power-supply4.htm
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=311020

After a fire inside of the unit, repair is out of the question.

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Somehow I read that the PSU was fine. I guess I just really like toast.

[Geek-9pm]

Somehow I read that the PSU was fine. I guess I just really like toast.

Carbon, I don't believe a hard drive can catch fire unless something very extreme happens. So I guess the PSU was then source of the problem. Only a rogue PSU can  deliver enough raw power  to catch things on fire.

Without an autopsy, it is hard to day.

Here is a reference:
http://www.pearsonitcertification.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1945640

Avoiding Power Supply Hazards—This section has guidelines for avoiding shock and fire hazards when working with power supplies.
...
Consequently, if you plug a standard power supply into a Dell PC that uses the proprietary version or use a regular motherboard as an upgrade for a model that has the proprietary power supply, stand by for smoke and fire
...

That is not a joke. The power supply is the thing that can most likely cause fire and smoke. But is a few cases, it is the CPU that catches fire. But with newer designs that should not happen.

Remember this?
Lenovo recalls 160,000 PCs due to fire risk

“a defect in an internal component in the power supply [which] can overheat and pose a fire hazard”.

[fatharock]

Thanks to all for your unselfish help, it's good to know we're not alone out here.
Some context; an IC chip on one drive is scorched and bubbled. A close tech savvy friend
of mine observed said drive fire and commented that he'd never seen this before. Great.


Thanks to Geek 9 for the insurance tip, I'll check into it for sure. This is the ultimate
Heads-up for how important backing up your files really are. The awful irony :
I had just bought a terabyte drive to back up all my audio files I recorded.

Sigh...

Thanks again everyone, I feel confident that we have identified the dastardly culprit.

fatharock
Rip *S*

[fatharock]

P.S.

One last question :

If my PSU was the victim of a huge power spike from the outlet, how " manly "
should a surge protector need to be?

Again, many many thanks !

fr

[Computer_Commando]

I had a hard drive go up in smoke right in front of me.  As soon as I plugged it in & turned computer on, smoke just pored out of it, removed power immediately.  Continuous application of power may have started a fire.

As to your situtation:  It's possible the chip on the drive shorted & killed the psu, but usually psu's will shutdown in the even of a short.  However, PSU's can pump out a lot of 12VDC power, just about everything runs on 12VDC, motherboard, graphics card, fans, hard drives, optical drives.  Chip on the hard drive is probably the motor controller.

Replace the psu & everything may now work, except the burned drive.

[fatharock]

Thx commando for your input.
I really appreciate it !

fr

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

Are the drives Seagates as they have over voltage protection that can  smoke if the drive has to high a voltage applied.
If you have the drives out please post a picture of the logic board clear enough to see where the damage is . It may not be terminal. When these devices fail they short out the power supply which should cause the power supply to shut down. Some higher wattage supplies and lower end supplies will just keep running even with the short. and hence why you get the effect you have.

Lisamaree

[BC_Programmer]

For the failed drives, you could try getting the exact same model of drive and swapping the logic boards. The damage may be confined to the logic board, and the data may still be accessible.

[DaveLembke]

For the failed drives, you could try getting the exact same model of drive and swapping the logic boards. The damage may be confined to the logic board, and the data may still be accessible.

Just wanted to note that this is a tricky match up. Not only do you need the same make/model drive, but you also need the same Rev and Firmware version! If the chips are as cooked as I am visualizing through the description, the Rev and Firmware version of that drive may be unable to be verified.

I attempted the same swap in the past between 2 drives and it didnt work until I found an (exact match) which was same Rev, and Same Firmware label version. I was able to find one on ebay for $20 that ended up working, but the other drive I had on site of a newer rev but same make/model drive would not work. It came up as an unpartitioned drive at which point I quickly shut it down to avoid anything getting written to the platters. Confirming with the ebay merchant that the drive in the pictured auction was in fact a match to be used as a board donor was the only thing that worked!

BUT this also does not guarantee that it will help your situation as for your drive may have gotten well beyond 12VDC to the motor that spins the platters in which if that is the case you add a donor board to the drive and it wont spin up 

If this is the case then only method of data recovery is sending it out and paying  for data recovery which can be quite costly.

 I have attempted to move platters of a drive which no longer spins into a same make/model and firmware/rev version drive making sure that they are installed in the same orientation with 2 drives that I no longer cared about, but still worked, and what looked like perfectly matched 0 degrees of rotation out from each other with total failure. So its best to have a data recovery center do their magic on drives that no longer spin. It was a wasted 8 hr long project! But I suppose a learning experience that even being as careful as can be to not fingerprint by wearing nitrile gloves or damage the platters in any other way, keep the same platter position by marking both platters outter unused for data edge scored with a razor blade and straight edge and magnifying glass to pair them back up in the same position to one another confirmed by using straight edge to line up the score marks exactly and then lock the platter retaining hub locks down. I also paid attention to not flipping the platters during the swap process. Initially I thought that maybe it was a failure of the donor drive to read the data, so I attempted to put the platters back into the original drive with extreme attention to detail verifying that everything was as perfect as it could be, including the heads that read/write to the platters that they were properly set. BTW: Moving the heads out of the way on the armature is a royal pain and a small torx set had to be purchased to unlock the platters from the retaining hubs.

Out of curiosity, after the drive was back together and unable to read the file system that was on the platters, I was able to repartition the drive and format it and write a text file to the drive and read the test file off the drive, so I can only assume that the rotation of the platters even though as close to the eye as can be, was offset by a fraction of a degree making the data unable to be read.

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

There is two situations where you should NEVER swap logic boards even if they are exactly the same in every way.

With any Western Digital Harddrive.

With any drive that uses  Perpendicular recording which was used in drives from 2005.

With these situations it is better to replace damaged chips or  know what chips need to be swapped between boards.

So much damage is done to drives swapping boards , freezing  and the other 98 ideas posted in the 100 ways to fix a failed hard drive this explains why after a user has tried all they can, the recovery companies have to charge what they do.


Lisa_maree
 

[BC_Programmer]

With any Western Digital Harddrive.

Citations? Honestly curious. Does WD do something specific that prevents this?

With any drive that uses  Perpendicular recording which was used in drives from 2005.

My understanding is that Perpendicular Recording technology is contained entirely within the Read/Write Head, and that it doesn't actually change the transcoding logic. Even if it did, I am curious as to know one logic board- from an identical drive- would have issues with another purely do to using perpendicular recording. I don't mean this as a "prove it!" thing, I'm genuinely curious to learn about how the differing technology can cause such unexpected side effects .

My searches on this currently give me these particular quotations, which somewhat contrast what you have said:

Swapping Logic Boards Live
I have done this process several times successfully. It is not perfect but it is a possible chance you will have to recover your data. The first step is to get a hard drive as close to identical as the bad drive you have that is a working drive. At the bottom of this paper you will find help about matching hard drives and serial numbers. If the System Area is badly damaged or corrupt and for some reason the drive will not read the System Area you can attempt to do a live swap. What this means is that you can hook up the good drive, then you use software or windows and tell the drive to go to sleep.  This will cause the drive to spin down but will still be live and powered up and mounted.  Once the drive goes to sleep and the drive stops spinning you can unscrew the board, carefully so as not to let the screws roll around on the board, and disconnect the board and connect it to the bad drive. I suggest that once you do this, you go after the files you need very quickly. It’s possibly you will be able to make an image of the drive.  Keep in mind, that whatever bad blocks that the drive had assigned to the other drive will be bad here as well.  You could try to use some software to clear bad blocks before attempting this, however I don’t suggest it in most cases. That is because it is one more possible item that might cause failure. I would prefer to use the drive that was working and lose a few blocks. After you get what you can then you can attempt to make changes and go back for more data. This is a concept that works about 25% of the time.

With these situations it is better to replace damaged chips or  know what chips need to be swapped between boards.

This will usually resolve the primary risk factor of logic board swaps, which is that the Firmware-stored Sector remappings will be lost- and replaced with the Sector remappings of the other drive. The result is that when the 'fixed' drive tries to read from a sector that the new firmware thinks is good but that was bad previously, it will end up 're-learning' that it's bad and remapping it, and when an attempt is made to read a sector that used to be good but the new logic board thinks is bad (all HDD's ship with defects) it will read what the firmware thinks is a remapped sector that will likely result in seemingly random data.
If most of the data is in good shape and the new drive doesn't have too many listed defects, it can definitely be better than nothing at recovering data that isn't worth spending thousands of dollars to recover.

Either way, if the data is valuable, one ought to go with a Data Recovery Company.

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

The reason not to swap logic boards on western digital hard drives is that the drive firmware is spilt between the eeprom on the logic board and the track -1 on head 0 of the drive and the 2 need to match. Any difference causes the drive to have the click of death.

Lisamaree