bcraig15

my friend accidentally tried to attach his motherboard power connector when his power supply was plugged in. He said there was arcing from the motherboard connector at the time and now he is experiencing apparent multiple device failure. Both his hard drives fail to boot. One causes the computer to shut off immediately after powering on whenever it is connected (the drive discussed below), the other (the old master) has a boot disk fail IIRC. Also, the BIOS now fails to recognize one of the two optical drives in the computer.

I did some simple tests on one of the hard drives and discovered that the +5v and ground pins on the 4-pin molex socket are shorted together internally (i.e. 0 ohms of resistance between them). Has anyone seen anything like this before or know what the problem could be? The PCB traces and surface mount components look ok from a quick glance (nothing obviously smoked). So I'd guess either something (maybe an IC) burned internally, or one of the drive's motors got fried.

At this point, I'm recommending he just send the drives into a recovery specialist because he claims he wants the data if there is any chance of getting it. I had impressed upon him the need to make backups of his data, but the guy now realizes backing up your data to a different partition on the same drive isn't necessarily the best strategy. Considering there actually wasn't any catastrophic failure or platter damage, are there any good services or cost estimates for this type of work?

Thanks!