HDD caught fire...

B

blackacidevil

Gawd
Joined
Oct 1, 2004
Messages
746
Yes, it's true. Power surge in my building. Lucky the HDD was the only thing damaged. However, I have data on that drive I NEED.

A chip on the PCB underneath melted. Could it be as simple as buying an identical HDD and swapping the chip?
Or cracking the thing open and swapping platters?
 
There are companys that will do this for you, that chance of you pulling this off alone is honestly about 0
 
there are many cases which i know about (saw it in real life) where this works, BUT, caution with:

1) HDD model and REVISION. Between some revisions, there may be some really great changes, from number of platters or even the spin direction.
2) If it was a Western Digital, u could best send the drive to some company as Vashypooh recommends.
3) Seagate are the easiest ones ;)

Don't open the drive and don't swap the platters, what you'll get is more and more corrupted information and maybe no information at all. Just change the PCB ;)

Good luck ;)
 
Seriously, if the data is worth it send it to a data recovery company. Hard to believe, but our tech academy building burned to the ground at my high school my freshie year. The teachers were stunned, we basically were all given free passes on all our final projects. Drive Savers, being a local company, volunteered their services and rescued about 90-95% of the overall data from about 50 computers - computers that you could barely even recognize. So long as nobody put thermite to your platters I'd think that a data rescue company could find a solution.

If you try it yourself, get the closest matching bios/revision/everything as possible (as already noted). Make your own little clean room if you can, that's probably your best bet if the pcb is toast. Somebody I knew tried to do this on his own and he ran into problems with even changing minor bios revisions.
 
Well, a guy in my gaming clan is a PC-tech, and claims that he's swapped platters a bunch of times without a problem.

It's a Maxtor 160.

How easy would it be to swap the PCB?
 
www.ontrack.com

these people can do wonders when there is next to no hope otherwise. It will cost you significantly, but its up to you what your foolishly unbacked-up data is worth.
 
I'm gonna refer my friend to thread (hes a member here) this as this happened to him, and guess what, he bought the exact same model hard drive and swaped the pcb, and it worked perfectly (well almost, I'll let him explain)
 
blackacidevil said:
Well, a guy in my gaming clan is a PC-tech, and claims that he's swapped platters a bunch of times without a problem.

It's a Maxtor 160.

How easy would it be to swap the PCB?
Click to expand...

I find that very hard to believe. There is a reason those platters are sealed very tightly into the hard drive casing. My old technology teacher from high school would give extra credit to any student that could remove the platters, seeing as it is very difficult.
 
blackacidevil said:
Well, a guy in my gaming clan is a PC-tech, and claims that he's swapped platters a bunch of times without a problem.
Click to expand...

:rolleyes: Umm, yeah.

Without proof, I find that really, really hard to believe.
Not exactly something I would recommend anyone try, if you ever want to salvage any data off of that disk...
 
digitalx0 said:
I find that very hard to believe. There is a reason those platters are sealed very tightly into the hard drive casing. My old technology teacher from high school would give extra credit to any student that could remove the platters, seeing as it is very difficult.
Click to expand...

I've taken apart dozens of hard drives, the platters themselves aren't that difficult to free up.

To the OP:
By sheer luck, I toasted 2 IBM Z15 PCBs. Pulled the drive out of a hotswap SCA caddy and it toasted itself and the other drive on the SCSI bus, killing the RAID1 mirror I was fixing in the first place. lol

Luckily I had 2 spares lying around. I swapped the PCBs from the spares onto the zapped drives and got my data back. There were all of 2 small flex cables running from the PCB to the interior of the drive. One for the servo/heads, and the other for the spindle motor.
I will say that I ordered 5 of those drives at the same time and they were all identical all the way down to the firmware, so it was a pretty safe swap. Had to buy a Torx T5 (or was it T7?) bit to get the screws out, though. The only set I could find at Walmart at the time was $20, so basically it cost me $20 to get my data back :)

I'd say a PCB swap would be your best bet, maybe you can find someone with an identical drive that they dropped and crashed the heads on it. Hopefully the PCB will be just fine :)

I salvaged an IBM Deskstar 75GXP with a PCB swap, as well. Bought a dead one as mentioned above and everything swapped fine.
 
Chilly said:
I'm gonna refer my friend to thread (hes a member here) this as this happened to him, and guess what, he bought the exact same model hard drive and swaped the pcb, and it worked perfectly (well almost, I'll let him explain)
Click to expand...
Haha yea.

Same thing happened. After 2 tries, though, I got an identical model.

It works PER SE (the drive was detected and I could access files on it), but I got a lot of Cyclic Redundancy Check errors when copying from it, and the drive read/write speed was REALLY slow. It's not good if you need to recover hundreds of Gigabytes of data, but if you only need a couple files or folders and you've got the time to keep pressing "OK" and copying the files again, it's a good solution.

Plus, when you're done, you can RAID the two (or three... :rolleyes: ) drives, after you RMA the broken one of course! ;)

NOTE ABOUT MAXTORS:

If you're HDD is a Maxtor and was pre-Seagate buyout, make sure you find a person with a drive that's only +- 1 or 2 months. This happened to me (I bought a new one from NCIX) and the controller was completely different! Just a note of caution.
 
hokatichenci said:
Seriously, if the data is worth it send it to a data recovery company. Hard to believe, but our tech academy building burned to the ground at my high school my freshie year. The teachers were stunned, we basically were all given free passes on all our final projects. Drive Savers, being a local company, volunteered their services and rescued about 90-95% of the overall data from about 50 computers - computers that you could barely even recognize. So long as nobody put thermite to your platters I'd think that a data rescue company could find a solution.

If you try it yourself, get the closest matching bios/revision/everything as possible (as already noted). Make your own little clean room if you can, that's probably your best bet if the pcb is toast. Somebody I knew tried to do this on his own and he ran into problems with even changing minor bios revisions.
Click to expand...
I'd just like to say, however, that this is EXTREMELY expensive.

I sent mine in to a company, and they wanted $1000 CAD to recover it!

Needless to say, I asked for it back. Then see my above post about what happened after!

It's always worth it to spend $100 or so to try this yourself. That way, if it works, you've saved yourself $900, and if it doesn't, you're only in the hole $100 more. Changing PCBs is NOT hard, doesn't require any sort of clean room, and with a lot of Maxtor drives using contact pads instead of ribbon cabels, it should be even easier!
 
HDD recovery is expensive indeed. Is it worth it for you to try yourself? Depends how valuable you feel your data is, and also the research you do on it. Like people have said, swapping platters is doable. Hell, if you said a chip burnt, and you are REAL lucky, and good with tools, you could swap it and it'll work. But chances are if it blew something, something else you haven't noticed is probably busted up as well.

As for the dangers of exposing the platters, surely it can't be a good thing in the longterm, but for quick recovery, you *might* be okay for most of the data that's still recoverable. I have a story about this. About 5 years ago, I got a 1.2gb hdd for free from my school. It was in pretty bad shape. I loaded up a low level drive tool (ranish partition manager) and went through all the cylinders. I noticed a pattern after traversing the drive a few times. Once I hit a certain point, it would randomly start grinding real hard. Some spots would always trigger it. Some were hit or miss. But I did notice that a different region was completely trouble free. I never looked too far into it to determine why it was, the logic behind it, etc. However, I created a partition that only stayed within the boundaries of the grinding / corrupting data, and ran a copy of windows 95 on it for over two years with the hdd TORN OPEN!! I had it just sitting around doing occasional stuff while the main machine was down for a format or whatever. But with all the dust and everything, in those two years that I used the drive, I didn't experience one bit of corruption. The drive didn't (or at least the motherboard didn't support it) have SMART. But all in all, I was quite shocked. Wish I took some pictures of it in action.
 
Swapping platters is not an easy task.

Their orientation must be preserved relative to the drive read head, or else the sector map gets screwy.

I've only had one success swapping a drive platter before. It was a single platter 20gb drive, obviously with larger sectors making the transfer easy. I've tried about 8 others... All larger drives (which I think hampered my success).

I've replaced the PCBs on 4 raptors, 5 seagates, literally 12 maxtors and a WD2500.

Only 1 of the segates didn't wake up.
 
yeah i seriously doubt that swapping platters is a viable option here

on a single-platter drive, it shouldn't be hard to swap a platter. however, when you get into 2+ platters you run into some alignment issues.
 
Um, the OP isn't talking about swapping platters. He's talking about swapping controller boards.
 
djBon2112 said:
Um, the OP isn't talking about swapping platters. He's talking about swapping controller boards.
Click to expand...

See the original post:
"Or cracking the thing open and swapping platters?"
 
"A chip on the PCB underneath melted. Could it be as simple as buying an identical HDD and swapping the chip?
Or cracking the thing open and swapping platters?"

Yes. And I'm saying that with only a burnt chip, just swapping the controller is enough. I just did it.
 
thanks for the input guys. The local pc shop down the road still sells the Maxtor drive in question....so I dont think swapping the PCB will be an issue. Hopefully it's as easy as it sounds.
 
You've got a 50/50 shot on a 160GB Maxtor. With each similar PCB you can acquire and attempt, your chances increase. It's a shot in the dark because you don't know what you're looking for, beyond the basics, and nobody who makes money doing it is going to clue you in (sorry to say).

But I'll give you a hint, absolutely do NOT open that drive, there's nothing you can do internally to repair this drive. The guy with the 1.2GB drive that ran for a time while open doesn't understand why that won't work for a 160GB Maxtor, and that tells me he knows nothing of modern drive functionality.
 
Yes, modern drive platters have data so close and read heads so fine that even the tiniest particle of dust will destroy it.
 
I have a 160GB maxtor sitting around. If the one from your local store doesn't have the exact same model, let me know.
 
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