Shcr said:
it really fried. My daughter called and said she had an error message
about atapi - cd-rom.....
she tried again to re-boot, a little bit later, smoke from the hard drive.
I pulled it out and the board is literally fried, charcoal.
might it be worthwhile to find another on ebay and switch the logic board
out to try and recover some data?
I haven't got a new drive yet to determine if the data she wants to
recover is on this or the other drive that is ok.
Is her data worth the cost of 2 hard drives: one for the replacement PCB and
another to use new (and without the damage that caused the first one to
fry). If the PCB on the hard drive is fried, whatever caused it to fry is
probably still present. If, for example, the spindle was generating a lot
of heat due to worn bearings then it will still generate a lot of heat after
you replace the PCB. At best, you can copy of some of the files onto
another hard drive and then discard the bad drive. The drive without the
PCB is worthless so you'll end up having to buy a 2nd hard drive. If the
spindle siezed up or was generating so much heat then you might not get
anything off the drive.
You will also have to find an EXACT match for the circuit board. However,
even that may not be enough. Parameters of the drive are stored on the PCB.
I had a drive which blew one of the 3 voltage regulator chips. I got
another PCB which was an exact match but the company said that it probably
wouldn't work anyway because a common PCB is used across that family of
products and they get updated for the particular drive they get used with.
However, the drive had siezed so it wouldn't spin up at all (there was no
whine of the platters starting to spin up).
You can try but it's a long shot. There are those services that grab the
data right of the platters, like Ontrack, but they are pricey. Decide if
your data is worth the cost.
