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Author Topic: Dead Harddrive???  (Read 6079 times)

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Ryuk

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    Dead Harddrive???
    « on: December 05, 2012, 03:28:59 PM »
    I just tried to power my terra drive on an it started smokeing thinking its the electronic board.

    patio

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    Re: Dead Harddrive???
    « Reply #1 on: December 05, 2012, 09:58:19 PM »
    Probably a good guess i'd say...
    " Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined. "

    DaveLembke



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    Re: Dead Harddrive???
    « Reply #2 on: December 05, 2012, 10:14:11 PM »
    Hello... seems that you have the worst of luck with everything or are inquiring about other peoples problems as your own to help them out. Only time I have seen a hard drive smoke was an external in which the customer plugged their laptops 18VDC power into it and its meant for a 12VDC input.  If your lucky it just fried the 5V & 12V voltage regulators on the small power/com board of the external and didnt go up stream to the hard drive itself as can sometimes happen.

    Was this drive powered with the incorrect power supply? Or smoked on its original "correct" power supply?

    If your lucky only the small board inside the enclosure that handles power and communications is fried and damage is localized to that. I wouldn't remove the hard drive and connect it to any computer that you wouldnt mind trashing if say the drive was internally shorted allowing for 12VDC to cross over into 5V and 3.3V circuitry and fry your motherboard.

    Even better is if you have a "Good" external enclosure with correct power supply, that you can install this drive into to test it, so that if its dead, 99.9% of the time the problem will remain with the drive and maybe only take out an enclosure vs back feading the USB port to your computer.

    Ryuk

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      Re: Dead Harddrive???
      « Reply #3 on: December 06, 2012, 05:53:27 AM »
      sorry, was upset last night especially, since I couldnt get the drive backed up.  I really couldnt tell you for sure till I get the board off but, I dont have any too swap out.  I used one of those apadters that has a molex an changed it to a SATA.  Yeah, sad thing is I was just about to get a new enclousre since someone told me ESATA would of worked.

      Allan

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      Re: Dead Harddrive???
      « Reply #4 on: December 06, 2012, 05:53:38 AM »
      Hello... seems that you have the worst of luck with everything or are inquiring about other peoples problems as your own to help them out.
      Clearly he is trying to get paid to fix other people's computers but lacks the knowledge to do so (not to mention the ability to communicate effectively). Personally, I think it's a complete waste of time to get involved in any thread he starts.

      Ryuk

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        Re: Dead Harddrive???
        « Reply #5 on: December 06, 2012, 06:08:48 AM »
        how is my personal drive with pictures, video's, an a bunch of unsorted files a :-\

        Ryuk

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          Re: Dead Harddrive???
          « Reply #6 on: December 06, 2012, 06:24:13 AM »
          I got the board off its something else that failed.   Not the best photo but near the power connector an stuff


          [year+ old attachment deleted by admin]

          reddevilggg



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          Re: Dead Harddrive???
          « Reply #7 on: December 06, 2012, 06:33:58 AM »
          I got the board off its something else that failed.   

          Beginning to think he does this on purpose........
          11 cheers for binary !

          Ryuk

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            Re: Dead Harddrive???
            « Reply #8 on: December 06, 2012, 06:45:01 AM »
            Beginning to think he does this on purpose........

            I don't see how. I don't have a enclosure son I used an external adapter to connect too it. Like I said its not a capictor though. Can I pull one off another board. I have some drives that click that are ide

            reddevilggg



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            Re: Dead Harddrive???
            « Reply #9 on: December 06, 2012, 07:08:57 AM »
            I don't see how.

            Because, the information telling us the the board already came from a failed drive should of been in the first post. How are people supposed to attempt to answer your posts when you provide information in dribs and drabs. Your a timewaster. Until you get it then i'm afraid i'm not getting involved. Going round in circles with little information aint my idea of helping. It just ends up being guess work.
            11 cheers for binary !

            truenorth



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              Re: Dead Harddrive???
              « Reply #10 on: December 06, 2012, 08:09:57 AM »
              Upon the sage advice of a senior CH member a short while back regarding this member i have adopted the hands off approach. I only join this thread to encourage others to do the same. If  Ryuk is capable of change i would encourage that and that he become a coherent member of the forum. There is no way one member could have so many varied computer issues and be so lacking in the communication skills to explain them unless a concerted effort were being made for other reasons.truenorth

              Ryuk

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                Re: Dead Harddrive???
                « Reply #11 on: December 06, 2012, 08:39:12 AM »
                I mentioned that when I first posted that the board failed.  Cause, I dont have time to all ways post here. 

                reddevilggg



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                Re: Dead Harddrive???
                « Reply #12 on: December 06, 2012, 08:45:02 AM »

                Cause, I dont have time to all ways post here. 

                Touche
                11 cheers for binary !

                DaveLembke



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                Re: Dead Harddrive???
                « Reply #13 on: December 08, 2012, 01:21:24 AM »
                Posting this here in case anyone else ever runs into this situation. If the hard drive interface board that is attached to the hard drive fails, in order to get data off that drive, if the data isnt trashed by failed writes to the platters, you will need to find an EXACT match to that drive to use a donor hard drives interface board. EXACT MATCH is not just same make/model, but the firmware has to be the same. If one was version 1.0A and the other is 1.0B its not likely going to work. Also you want the donor drives date code to be as close as possible to the drive that failed as for in addition to firmware changes during the manufacturing process other changes can happen to which even though the drives are the same make/model/ and firmware rev, it wont work because the manufacturer made a change of some sort that is not documented and the board just wont work.

                Only time I got lucky swapping the Hard Drive Interface Board was when I had bought a group of SCSI drives and a system that had been running of off a single SCSI drive on a server 2000 setup crapped out and a co-worker added processes to it that he assumed were safe to be there and because RAID was not being used on that system, we had a situation where we had a single drive with data we needed off of it and it spun up, but was not detected by the Adaptec U160 controller. I looked at a good drive I had from the group that we had as a spare, and compared the boards and the Rev's were an exact match. I wasnt able to locate the firmware version, but was able to compare serial numbers and the serial numbers were very close ( within about 300 of each other ). I used my small torx set and carefully removed the bad board and good boards from the drives ( first marking the bad board with an X with a sharpie marker ) to not get confused as to which board is which and successfully moved the known good board over to this other drive. Booted the system up and whalla, the Adaptec controller was able to see the drive and the data we needed was in an area that was not corrupt. Quickly copied data over network to a safe location on a RAID 5 set and then moved this board back to the original drive it came from and tested it as a good working spare drive. Then saved the bad drive off to the side marked that the board is bad in case we ever needed to mix a platter/motor set with a different board again. Most people would have thrown the bad drive out or sent it back under warranty. I didnt want to send it back under warranty because I tampered with it to get my data back for the company and broke the seals on the  torx screws, so it wouldnt be honored anyway for warranty since I tampered with it.

                So just wanted to mention this in case someone came in to view this at some point with a similar issue. You can get your data back without sending it out to an expensive data recovery center, but you have to have exact drive for donor board, and it has to be manufactured around the same time ( serial numbers are a good indicator of this ), and firmware has to match between drives, and sometimes they are not labelled!

                Lisa_maree



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                Re: Dead Harddrive???
                « Reply #14 on: December 08, 2012, 01:17:59 PM »
                Hi Ryuk

                Those 2 components are there to go short circuit when the drive has had more than 12 and 5 volts applied. If you test them with a ohm meter and they are 0 ohms then that's what has happened. The short circuit component probable the larger one can be removed, if you don't have a soldering iron just smash it with a pair of pliers. Then carefully transfer the data off the drive being really careful not to get the wrong voltage on the hard drive remember the over voltage  protection has gone, so don't use the drive once the data is removed.

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                DaveLembke



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                Re: Dead Harddrive???
                « Reply #15 on: December 10, 2012, 09:29:21 PM »
                Good Suggestion Lisa_Maree ( and good to see another electronics savy member with us here   ;D  )... If the damage is only the transorb(s) if there are any and NOT the 5V and 12V Regulators that got cooked, it might be able to be powered in an unprotected from overvoltage state by removing the short as a result of a suspected shorted transorb(s) that did its/their job.

                But if introduced to overvoltage again under no protection, you risk burning out the internal drive components such as the Motor that spins the platters and the signal amplifier off the aperture arm and then really be in a load of hurt if you have important data on the platters. If you blow the amplifier that is internal to the drive or the motor then the drive would have to go to a recovery center to get the data back by carefully swapping the aperture/heads/amp and if it doesnt spin on its own, they will have to do their magic to make it spin. ( Not a cheap procedure. Saw a company shell out $1500 once for their data to be recovered. )

                Just wanted to mention this in case anyone other than Ryuk reads this in the future and has a similar issue. Powering up this way, if removing transorbs and short goes away, comes at a level of risk!

                *Also if the person with the issue can not identify the type of component that failed, but know its bad because it got cooked. Removal of the component if a series circuit component will just mean that the drive will most likely not operate, while if a parallel circuit component, there is a very slim chance that the drive might come to life and be able to be used long enough to get the data off of it if you removed overvoltage/power filtering components.