Is there any hope or a p.c.'s series of unfortunate events

[Duneadan]

Is there any hope, or "a p.c.'s series of unfortunate events"

Hi guys,

In a nutshell, do I have any hope of repairing my 300 gb hard drive by installing a new PCB onto the drive?

Me and my computer have been through the ringer lately. I recently bought a PATA Seagate 300 GB monster drive to try to reconstruct a damaged raid array. I used RaidReconstructor and GetYourDataBack for NTFS. It worked to degree, though some of the files were still corrupted--but I did get most of my files back.

But then the drive became corrupted. It appeared to be an ongoing problem with the MSI K8Neo4 Ultra motherboard, which I have had to replace since then. I thought at first that it was just a dead raid drive, but I was wrong.

Anyway, in the course of trouble shooting this problem, I had the 300 GB drive hooked up to a legacy Athlon XP Windows 98 system.

Because the drive was NTFS, I installed Windows XP on another spare WD 30gb drive, I had lying around. I got sloppy, though. Rather than mounting the WD and Seagate in the case, I simply hooked up both and placed them on the floor on the outside of the case.

Then disaster. I moved my wheeled chair into my desk, and one of the wheels hit the two drives on the floor.

The legacy system seemed to suffer some kind of short circuit and shut down.
However, the primary WD drive was fine. The 300 GB drive was still unreadable, though.

At this point, I decided better safe, than sorry, and I unplugged both drives and put them back on the shelf.

When I replaced the motherboard, I tried installing the 300 gb drive in the new system to see if there was any way to recover any data from it now.

So I installed the drive into the drive bay under the floppy drive. I plugged everything in, and powered up the machine.

And then I let the smoke out--lots and lots of smoke. It kind of reminded me of a spinning firework on the 4th of July. .

I couldn't tell if it was the floppy drive or the new hard drive that was smoking, but both were toast.

There were scorch marks on the floppy drive's case. One of the chips on the PC Board of the hard drive looked as though it had melted or had been partially burned off.

Which leads me back to my question: is there any hope of salvaging the drive with a new PCB? Or would I merely be risking further damage to the other components attached to my system?

 

[Murdochs_mad]

If you can find exactly the same 300gb drive, (exact modle code) you should be able to transplat the circuit board, but if there was a lot of heat when it burnt then it could of killed the data on the platters. Have you done anything with the raid array since you recovered the files from it? If not try installing the raid into the AXP system and recovering it again, you may have better luck seeing as you think the msi board was to blame in the first place.

 

[Duneadan]

Unfortunately, once the data was recovered from the raid array, it was copied onto the 300 GB hard drive. Also, one of the disks in the array suffered complete failure as well, so I had to replace it after copying the recovered files to the 300 GB drive, thinking the data was safe there.

I don't think the heat was enough to melt the platters if it came from the floppy drive since it only melted one chip on the hard drive's PCB. On the other hand, if it was coming from the hard drive itself, it may have been enough. However, it was only one very small chip on the PCB that appears to have melted. So maybe there is hope.

Having said that, I guess my next question is: How hard is it to replace the PCB once I have a compatible board? By that I mean, will I have to solder anything to make it work?

Thanks for the advice!

 

[Murdochs_mad]

It shouldn't be to hard to replace the pcb, its been a long time since I did it. If I remember you won't need to solder anything, because all the connections to the outside world are sealed so it may be just a couple of little plugs, having said that the motor that drives the platters may need to be soldered, but if you look at the drive you should be able to see how its connected.

 

[Duneadan]

Cool bro. Thanks. I feel much more comfortable voiding the warranty if I don't have to risk melting the new board.

Now to find the replacement board.....