Killed two HDs (long story)

[Chowyuntaba]

I feel like i just shot myself in the foot! I managed to kill two of my HDs last nite. I was powering these HDs with a Y-splitter connecteed to a molex. But i wanted to fit the splitter in a tight spot so I took the female plug apart, fit it through the tight spot, then reassembled it. I made sure to see that the 12 and 5 volt lines on the female connection matched the 12 and 5 of the molex... COLORWISE. Meaning, I only went by yellow to yellow, red to red, blacks to blacks. I didnt check to see if they went to the 12 and 5 volt inputs of the HDs. So, everytime I booted up, the computer hung when detecting the drives. Puzzled, I checked that the drives were getting power via multimeter. Solid 5 and solid 12! Finally, as I was about to give up, I checked out the configuration of the way a regular molex went into another HD and to my horror, it was REVERSED! My splitter fed the 12V to the 5V line of the HDs and vice versa! Damn near had a heart attack. dug around for another splitter I had picked the same time I bought with the one in use and compared the two. As it turns out, color coding didnt matter. So, molex yellow(12) fed splitter red and molex red(5) fed splitter yellow for the sound and unmodified splitter. I went by color code and connected molex to splitter, yellow to yellow and red to red when it should have been yellow to red and red to yellow.

Hard lesson I learned today, should have been more careful and should have doubled check ALL my work before flicking on the switch. Lost a WD1200JB and a samsung 40G spinpoint

plugged into seperate molex hoping the computing gods may have spared my HDs, but to no avail... they have left me.

anyone know if they can be salvaged datawise as well as hardwarewise? this is only assumption, but wouldnt the 12V power the motor and the 5V power the logic... so if I overvolted the logic, would it be possible to just contact my respective manufacturers for logic repair/replace ie. the underside pcb?

I was also thinking that since I can obtain an identical WD1200JB, can i just switch pcb to get my dead one working to offload data? provided , of course, that the logic is the onlything wrong with it.

anyways, I just wanted to share some of my misfortune so that to enlighted the few that are not... to not do what did.

 

[skab]

Pooped a seagate 15gb that way, I was making a fan cable using an older computer cable and was not wired the same way. RMA'd it before I realized it was my fault. Never tried it but could you put the disk in a different drive? Seems I read about somebody doing this once.

 

[attack]

holy crap! Dude I wouldn't feel like a moron, I've done that plenty of times with splicing (lining up just colors....). Thanks for posting this you easily could save me from toasting one of my own HDD in the future!

Also...ask around on the forums for anyone has a dead drive like the ones you lost. I'll be only the back circuit board is shot, If you get a similar model that from a HDD with bad disks you can take off the backplate circuit board, pop it on yours and she might work. It's worth a shot, especialy if you had important data on those drives.

 

[RadRacer]

you can get an advance RMA on the WD. what they'll do is send you a new drive first, then just swap the electronics on them and send the new one right back to them and tell them that you got it working again. no idea on the other one.