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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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3 Drives wont spin/power on

September 11th, 2011, 21:25

Hi All,

I installed a new power supply in my PC, tired to power it on and all I heard was a "tick", CPU fan spun for a second then stopped. Unplugged all cables, plugged all back in and it powers on fine. BIOS only detects 2 out of 5 HDD's.

After some lengthy troubleshooting I find that 3 of the hard drives will not spin, even tried on a different power supply, while 2 remain fine.

There appears to be no physical damage on any of the PCB's, I'll post up high rez images of them later so you can take a look to make sure.

Even though I can't see any physical damage to the PCB's, is this most likely going to be the issue? Damaged PCB?

If this is indeed the case, I can source replacement PCB relatively easy. I've read that on some drives to replace the PCB you also need to keep certain chips from the original drive otherwise the swap will not work, is anyone aware of anything special I'll need to do in order to replace the PCB on the following drives?

Or does anyone have any suggestions on what the issue might be other than the PCB?

Samsung 1TB 5400rpm 32M
Model: HD103UI HDD P/N: HD103UI/Y REV.A
F/W: ???
Site: ???
Date: 9/2008

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB
Model: ST31000528AS
F/W: CC38
Site: SU
Date: 25/11/2009

Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB 64M
Model: WD20EARX
F/W: 00PASB0
Site: Malaysia
Date: 16/6/2011

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!

Re: 3 Drives wont spin/power on

September 11th, 2011, 22:01

@pokey144:

Based on your description, where that new PSU seems to have damaged 3 disk drives, perhaps your first action should be to replace it (or at least have it professionally tested)? The fact that 2 disk drives seem to be still running from it, does not mean that the PSU is working correctly.

pokey144 wrote:There appears to be no physical damage on any of the PCB's, I'll post up high rez images of them later so you can take a look to make sure.

If you post the images, perhaps someone will have a look for you, but diagnosing PCB damage via photos is not always possible, especially if you have already looked and see no damage. Some damage can be easily measured with a multimeter (although some damage can't). You'll find lots of discussions on this topic, in this forum.

Re: 3 Drives wont spin/power on

September 11th, 2011, 22:39

Vulcan wrote:The fact that 2 disk drives seem to be still running from it, does not mean that the PSU is working correctly.

After testing with my old PSU I left that one in it and I'm returning the new one to the vendor to have it tested.

Vulcan wrote:Some damage can be easily measured with a multimeter (although some damage can't). You'll find lots of discussions on this topic, in this forum.


Thanks I've got a multimeter so I'll have a search and give this a shot.
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