Hard drive electronics pc board

[Curt]

A couple weeks ago my PSU smoked BOTH of my WD drives. One a 40gig 7200, the other a 13gig 5400.

When I tried to boot I smelled that electrical burning smell and it sounded that if the case were off I'd have seen sparks.

After opening things up, the case fans and the cpu fan come on but the drives didn't spin up. I tried different cables, swapping ports, etc. I had accumulated a new motherboard, psu and other goodies to upgrade to a P4. Swapped out the power supply but that didn't fix the problem. Jury-rigged the new motherboard and tried the drives on the new ports, swapping cables again, etc. She no go. Bought a new hard drive and the system (new P4) is working.

I removed the drive control board from the 40 gig and sure enough there was a chip that was smoked. One of the "legs" on one of the chips had blown like a fuse. I suspect that when the power supply went, it overvolted something in the drive control electronics. I've heard that it is possible to obtain these boards. However I don't know where. Can anyone steer me to a source? I'll check with WD but there may be 3rd party source. I'm hoping that the data is still there if I can get the drive to run.

Comments, suggestions please.

OTC

[Cricket]

Sounds like you had a DEER brand power supply die on you. What brand did you replace it with?

Sorry, I can't help you with the hard drive PCB question.

Cricket

[scott_d]

GLC said something about putting a possibly dead hard drive in the freezer for a while, then it might work. He said he had gotten data off of a hard drive this way, but it would only work for a few minutes at a time. You could at least try this.

Originally posted by GLCIf the board isn't totally burned, you might be able to stick the drive in a Ziploc bag in the freezer for a while - and get it to spin up long enough to get your data off it. I did this with a Quantum once - you could see the burn mark on the main controller chip, but over a period of 2 days I got 8 gigs of data off the thing - 5 minutes at a time.

The one way I know how to get a replacement pcb board would be from another hard drive of the same make and model...
HTH

[Curt]

Cricket - I don't know what the old supply was. It came with my enlight 7237 a few years ago. The new one is Antec True Power 330 which should be good.

Scott-d - I think I'm past the freezer trick. Don't think the cold will reconnect the pin that was fried on the chip on the board.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

OTC

[Tuf]

Send it back to WD and have them repair it.

[Curt]

Interestingly enough, WD does not repair their drives. Nor do they have or know of a source for the electronic boards. Their suggestion is to go to a data recovery operation. Much as I want my data, that ain't going to happen.

May have to see if I can find a drive that crashed and salvage the board off of that.

Thanks for your inputs.

OTC