aridhol's Journal: Hard drive surgery

I'm on Halifax now on a 4-month course. Among other things that I packed along, I brought my laptop (of course) and my external hard drive, on which resides my music collection. Unfortunately, I brought the wrong power supply, and managed to drive 12 volts down a 5 volt connection.

I currently have a very dead hard drive (Samsung SP1604N), which I would like to recover. I have already purchased a new enclosure. If the hard drive is not connected, the light comes on; however, if the drive is connected, the light comes on briefly then goes out. The hard drive doesn't spin up.

Does anybody have any suggestions regarding drive surgery options? Is there a fuse or something similar I can replace or bypass just for a couple hours so I can copy my files onto a new drive?

HD surgery

[hairpinblue]

Good luck with that one. The best thing that I've heard of is possibly buying a replacement hard drive of the exact same m0del and swapping the platters.

Re:

[aridhol]

I'm hoping it doesn't come to actually swapping out platters. Within the last half hour, I've narrowed it down to a single component (the discoloured one with black PCB around it :P ), maybe I'll be lucky enough to get something for that.

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[Talinom]

Replace the controller card that is on the bottom of the hard drive with one of the identical model type. While I have never personally done this I have heard several stories of it working out wonderfully. Perhaps that is what the parent poster meant. Swapping out platters would involve exposing them to air and micro-particles that would ruin the surface.

Either way there IS the last ditch option of going to a data recovery company and having them extract the data for a hefty price.

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[stoolpigeon]

that's what i did with a hard drive i toasted a while back. i googled around on part numbers, etc. found a controller card on ebay that matched my drive, and swapped them. worked like a charm. brought my drive back from the dead and i was able to recover my data. in fact it was a couple years ago or so and i'm still using that drive.

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[aridhol]

I'm not sure how confident I am in my surgical skills right now. Also, finding the component is a bit of a pain in the ass. I'm going to hit the local used computer stores this weekend, see if I can find something with this component, or possibly this board. If nothing else, I'll hope it's a fuse or protection diode (seems to be a regular suggestion where I've looked) and connect a jumper over it, pretty much guaranteeing the death of this drive AFAIK.

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[stoolpigeon]

the nice thing about the way i went about it - was i just had to replace the board- which took about two minutes and a screw driver. my original board had a brown spot where it burned (that i could see) and i wasn't about to try and fix it somehow. all that stuff was way too small.

but i knew the platters and everything inside was fine. so i just checked ebay for an identical drive - and found a guy who was just selling the bare board - which worked nicely.

i thought i had done a journal en

Re:

[aridhol]

Unfortunately, it looks like my control board will require soldering either way. Which sucks, 'cause my hands are generally too caffeinated to be steady enough for the soldering on this thing.

Re:

[stoolpigeon]

I guess I don't understand what has happened. I assumed there was a problem with the hard drive itself, but are you saying the problem is with the enclosure? Because if the controller that is connected to the hard drive itself is bad, you can just get a new one and take the old one off. No soldering there. If it is just the enclosure that is bad, maybe you could get access to a desktop machine and drop your hard drive in just long enough to get things off of it. Or maybe I'm still really confused about