Cool, board level repairs. Next you'll be scraping the Bayer mosaic filters off your DSLR sensor to build a Pentax Monochrom ... ;-)
G On Sep 15, 2013, at 8:01 AM, Brendan MacRae <bpmac...@gmail.com> wrote: > Well, I thought I'd post this here in case anyone needs to know one > way to fix a dead hard drive. > > We had a hellacious thunderstorm come through a couple of weeks ago > and with it the requisite amount of earth shaking thunder and > lightning. I had my Dell desktop PC on at the time and we had a power > spike followed by a brief black out. When the power came back on the > computer appeared just fine (it is plugged into a surge protector > which did not trip). A couple of days later after a few start ups I > heard the clicking sound of death from my primary HD. It still managed > to boot and the clicking went away so I ran a defrag and disk clean > and it appeared that the drive was working perfectly. > > Two boots later, nothing. Clicking returned and BIOS wouldn't > recognize the drive. > > Since this drive is partly backed up and doesn't contain anything > mission critical I decided I would attempt to fix it myself. After > searching the net for all kinds of advice (including some really bad > ideas about heating and freezing the drive) I opted to swap the PCB > board from a like drive and give that a go. $17 drive off eBay arrived > and I swapped boards. Clicking stopped, drive spun, but unfortunately > it still wasn't recognized in the BIOS. Bummer. > > I got a low-cost external drive enclosure so that I could more easily > test the unit on another Dell laptop. And after many fruitless and > frustrating attempts to get the computer to see the hard drive I > finally found a site that explained that the 8-pin ROM chip from the > failed drive's PCB needs to be swapped to the good donor board on some > drives. Ok, this isn't the easiest thing to do correctly by a shade > tree mechanic like me, but I gave it a go. You cannot use a soldering > iron, you have to heat the chip contacts with a heat gun and remove > the chip with tweezers. It's not easy and my first attempt failed to > secure the contacts on one side of the chip. Luckily, and > miraculously, a second attempt with the heat gun (modified with a > snout made from aluminum foil making a narrow tip) secured the > contacts when I applied light pressure to the top of the chip. Drive > came back to life on next attempt to connect via USB. Proceeded to > quickly copy any and all needed files. > > After all this, the rest of the weekend is pure gravy. <note to self: > back up ALL of your drives, dummy> > > Figured I'd post this since there are innumerable sites referencing > the control board swap but few mention the ROM swap needed for some > drives. For reference this is an 3.5" IDE 160GB WD Caviar from about > 2006. > > -Brendan > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
