Good Evening,

I'm having a huge problem with my seagate ST3160813AS drive. What happend was my power supply in my system blew out and when I say blew I mean it blew the capcitor slap off the board and unfortunatly took out my motherboard, and also my Harddrive. I can actually smell the electronics that got burned on the drive. So the drive will not power on. I contacted a company on ebay that had the same exact harddrive model,sitecode,firmware,pcb board numbers matched up everything matched. I took my PCB board and swapped it with the new one. Good news the drive powered up. Bad news it makes a very small clicking sound for about 10-15 seconds and then the drive powers back down. I'm assuming the head need to be changed out. I've have made a few of the head replacment tools with foil I got very steady hands and have been soldering electronics now for a few years laptops,wii,xbox360,tvs,dvd,radios a lot of different things. Besides paying a professional a couple of hundred dollars to switch the heads for me does this sound like something I can do worse case seneriao the drive gets messed best case it works. I'm planning on taking the head of the new drive and putting it in the new drive. When I move the heads off very very careful is there a way to prevent them from getting unaligned. Sorry for the long issue. Any suggestion please let me know thank you

The boards are not compatible without a ROM swap.

What video(s) did you watch for the head swap procedure?

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

Before I would attempt a head swap on this one and open up the drive and do what ever else you are thinking of on this one I would consider the PCB first off. Just becasue it got burned does not mean that your heads got burned too. You might only have to use a new pcb board and move the rom over before doing anything else on this one. What you can try is to get a donor pcb and just put it on. If your drive spins up again and you can hear the heads click this one is normal. The ROM is not the same and now you can proceed on and swap out your rom and try again with your pcb and see what happens. Head swap is normally on the bottom of the list to try and not on the top of the list.

_________________
Iorana Haraharaini

what do you mean switching out the rom. I have already switched out the pcb from the new harddrive I bought and it allowed the drive to turn on and spin up but it makes a light clicking noise for about 25-35 seconds then turns off.

Can somebody recommend me a heatgun I can purchase hopefully from somewhere local I live florida. We have walmart,kmart,compusa,acehardware,lowes,homedepot. and a few other places any suggestions thank you.

"ROM" is the general term that is (mis)used in this forum to apply to almost any memory device other than SDRAM.

In your case it refers to an 8-pin flash memory IC, usually with a "25" in the part number.

See the following URLs for help in identifying the components:

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_ICs.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diodes.txt
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Answer my question, and I'll answer yours . . .

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

@jono-ats this is the video that I watched on how to do the head replacement
http://computerszine.com/hard-drive-hea ... r-50-cents

I have replaced both 8 pin bios chips from the old pcb to the new pcb. nothing has changed same clicking sound and then 25-30 seconds later it powers down the drive. How can I test to make sure I installed the bios chip correctly is there a way to test for continuatity or something that will tell me its making a connection and it is installed correctly. thank you. Also I purchased a heatgun from craftsman this thing is huge can somebody recommend a smaller one that will get the job done. For pcs,radio,xbox360,ps3,phones really anything electronical Thank you

Thank you for the link. It was one of Scott's videos, as I suspected. Note that Scott did the demonstration while the drives were inside of a flow bench, which keeps particles out of the air.

While there are some people who make heat guns work for them out of desperation, I don't believe that I would consider any of them suitable for PCB rework. There is a big chance that you will ruin parts. And both sides of a PCB should be heated at the same time when using hot air.

The only viable solution is to hire someone who has the proper tools to do the job for you.

A magnifying glass helps to tell if the joints are good. Did you use liquid flux when removing or replacing the parts? (I already know the answer).

The purpose of diagnostics is to NARROW DOWN the possibilities until the fault is found. But you have expanded the list. We now don't know if a) you did the parts transfer correctly; b) you ruined the PCB in the process, or c) the EEROM was good to start with.

If you were able to successfully to migrate a GOOD IC onto a sufficiently compatible PCB, and you still have clicking, then chances are the preamp is shot, too. I don't recommend that you try Scott's $0.50 approach to swapping the heads.

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

I just sent an e-mail to Scott Moulton and suggested that he offer a survey with questions such as:

1. Did the procedure work, i.e. were you able to recover your data?

2. If so, how much of the drive did you recover?

3. If not, what did you do next?

4. What suggestions do you have for improving the training, etc.

Ultimately, I think that people who attempt to do these procedures after watching online videos ought to know what the typical outcomes are for the "casual" data recovery "technician."

Would you agree?

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

The problem I have in production of these videos is that no matter how much I include, or how many videos I produce, there is no way to include every single thing. It would be a two year long video and by the end of that video there would be a whole new slew of processes, changes, and corrections. I am trying to help as much as I can and have produced a lot of the basics in a selection of 90 or so free videos, however, since I give my stuff away, it makes it onto hundreds of sites without any specific consent from me such as the video listed above. It is difficult to control updates or new information or correct any future items and answer any questions. In many cases they even remove my name from the videos or papers etc.

And still in any video I produced, that did not mean there is not more to the process than shown, its just a small clip in many cases and people still need to practice on a dozen or more drives to get these things right. But every day I get 30 or 40 email from people who are looking for donor drives for the one they want to fix. I ask them if they practiced on two other drives of the same type to make sure they can do the process right and they always say "No, this is the only drive I want the data from." I don’t believe a survey from that list of people is helpful.

Even if I try to add or correct a problem I have heard from people after produce one of these 50 minute speeches, sometimes the person never sees the updates, or newer videos, or does any future research to find out. Sometimes later on I find out there was something wrong, or there is a better way, and I try to fix that but its already out there on 100 sites, so I try to release more videos to revisit the topic and correct it.

Its a hard problem when you are trying to help people, and as many of you know, when you are helping people sometimes you can never do enough. More more more. But I do try to help where I can. But to be honest, I would love to learn new things, and I am happy to read anything published on processes and procedures so feel free to correct me, publish something, even help correct things that might be wrong. But, i have no doubt that as you do it, you will start getting into some of the same problems I have now with material. Managing the old material and updating it is actually quite a big undertaking.

Thanks for listening….

Scott Moulton / http://www.MyHardDriveDied.com

Did you ever reply to this poor chap?

samusaran115
Nov 16th, 2010 at 10:41Reply | Quote | #21 Hi. I was trying to fix my hard Drive tonight, and one of the heads came off (it’s a little black thing with a “Y” shaped pattern on it.). How could I possibly fix this? Can I glue it, or should I solder it on? Any help would be appreciated!

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

Scott Why is your website so slow when there was only 2 people online? It seems a little spammy or is it just sssllloooowwwwww?

_________________
All went well until I plugged the drive in.

If the EEPROM were bad, then the drive wouldn't spin up, or am I missing something?

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Bad ROMs are rare. In many cases bad ROMs cause drives not to spin at all. But I think there might be exceptions.

Anyone else with experience care to weigh in?

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com

My understanding is that Seagate drives verify the checksum of the EEPROM before spinning up. This seems to be confirmed by the following URL.

http://www.datarecoverytools.co.uk/2010 ... t-process/

"step 4: Test if there’s external flash - load flash and verify - load inner flash - hard drive motor start up"

In fact it should be very easy for someone with expensive tools to confirm this behaviour. Save a copy of a good EEPROM, then enable PUIS and save it again. The difference between the two images should be in the PUIS flag and the checksum. Now modify the EEPROM such that PUIS is disabled and the checksum is invalid. In this case the code remains unchanged.

I'm betting that the drive won't spin.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

You should remember some case of drive where the rom content was wrong... Drive up but not working correctly. Rare but happened.

It does happen, rarely though.

I think there some other problem, not a bad ROM, which should have been diagnosed in a first place.

_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com