paradisel

Ok so few days ago. My Antec smartpower PS after a whole 1.5 years of owning, freaks out. Sends power surges into my box.

4 Hard drives, toast. 2 of them have blown ICs. The other 2 look ok but when I fire up a box with them, 1 causes bios to lock up and won't boot, the other it will boot but doesn't acknowledge the drive.

Has anyone attempted a hard drive repair by getting another board from a working HD and putting it onto another?

My biggest problem is of the 1.3 tb I had, I only want the .3 honestly. The rest was pr0n (sue me it's the internet) and music. One I don't care about, the music I own so I can rerip, though being able to salvage would save me time. Data recovery is expensive and I don't want to lay out tons of cash just to recover stuff I'm not interested in.

Has anyone tried this? Any reason if the internals are ok it shouldn't work?

peterhuang913

Putting boards over does work, but only if it's the same model.

wiseleo

O.u.c.h

OK, what are the exact models of the drives, date codes, and the firmware/microcode/mlc on them? You may need to buy some reflow soldering equipment to move microchips, but it would be cheaper than getting data recovery companies to work on it.

Be advised that often internals also fry.

In any event, this will be expensive.

paradisel

Well, as I said you can actually see the heat dmg the power inputs and area's near them took. The connections to inside the drives all look fine, I know that doesn't mean anything but...

The power only surged for about a second and half before I slapped the kill switch so I'm hoping it didn't get inside.

Drives:

Caviar SE p/n wd1200jb-00gvc0 120 gb (found them for 56.00)

Maxtor DiamondMax 21 320gb p/n 9dp04g-326 f/w 3.aae (found for 70.00)

Maxtor Maxline III 7L300S0 300gb sata

Caviar p/n wd1800bb-00daa0 180 gb


+1 more I'm trying to figure out where I set.

peterhuang913

1.5 sec is long enough to do alot of damage. That's why surge protectors snap in milliseconds.

wiseleo

You did not list firmware/microcode/mlc for all the drives.

Please provide as much information as is possible. What you are attempting to do is not easy.

So far, I see two WD and two Maxtor drives in the mix. I normally charge quite a bit of money for this kind of work and have a special workstation to move chips easily, but it sounds like you can handle it, potentially, so I'll try to give you a hand. :)

The real problem is that the internal electronics (preamp on the heads) inside the drive may also be fried. You won't know that until you repair the controller board.

You should concentrate on saving one of the disks where your important stuff was. The rest may be too much of a challenge and, frankly, too expensive.

On the WD 1200, for example, you'll likely need to move an 8-leg chip for the board to power up the drive correctly. In the old days, you could move boards without moving chips. That's not quite the case anymore.

In fact, you should probably post this on hddguru.com so you'd get qualified help from more people like me who are better familiar with your drives. They do this quite often.

Here is a sample of what you'll have to do: http://wd1200jb.freewebspace.com/