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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Customer brought me a dead drive

September 4th, 2011, 5:16

HDD: Seagate ST3500320AS 500GB Barracuda 7200.11

The drive experienced a power surge and one of the component on the PCB is burnt. Drive will not spin at all with a sata drive dock.

I ordered a new PCB from a company online and its on the way. I've been checking around on the web and noticed that newer drives require not just a new PCB but require the old ROM chip off of the old burnt PCB. Does this drive experience that same problem? Another person told me it would be an 8 pin chip on the old PCB but there are two 8 pin chips, so how do i identify the correct one?

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 4th, 2011, 5:36

Post a clear picture of the PCB component side up. If you're lucky it may only be the TVS diode that has gone on your original board.

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 4th, 2011, 5:51

Here is the picture, the camera I got had a hard time focusing that close, so it didn't come out real clear.
Attachments
DSCN0840-1.jpg

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 4th, 2011, 10:07

Remove the burnt component (TVS Diode) and try it.

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 4th, 2011, 10:17

CK, I only had to apply heat to one side of it because the other side was already disconnected, probably the heat build up from the power surge and the hard drive didn't spin up after I was done. Unless you have other advice, I'm probably going to have to wait for the new PCB to arrive and then figure out which circuit to remove and place it on the new board and try it.

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 8th, 2011, 9:08

OK guys, could you please help me out. I replaced the PCB board and spun it up and it works fine, but will not read the data.

I need to know what chip I need to swap to possibly get the data off. Could you tell me which chip it is on the board? The pic is still posted above.

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 8th, 2011, 9:17

Your picture is very bad quality so it's hard to see. If I were to guess from that picture I would say it's the chip circled in green. It should start with '25'. Take a better quality picture of the top left area of the PCB so that we can confirm.
Attachments
DSCN0840-1.jpg

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 8th, 2011, 9:19

I can see only 1 with 8 legs, so it's that one.

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 8th, 2011, 9:24

Just look up the part numbers and see which one is an EEPROM

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 8th, 2011, 9:52

After all there's 2 chips.
Didn't looked very well.

Re: Customer brought me a dead drive

September 8th, 2011, 10:19

Thanks guys for the input. I was able to use a magnifying glass to figure out the correct one.
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