My friend asked me to look at a harddrive and see if i could recover anything form it. When I got it out of the enclosure and looked at it closes and found what it looked like there where some cold solder joints and loose connection. Which is I figured was why it wasn't working. So I had him order a new pcb and I put it in. With the new pcb the computer sees the drive correctly in the bios and and in the device manager, though doesn't see it as having an volumes or partitions. So I plug it into my linux machine to see if test disk or such will have any luck finding anything, but every attempt at a read just returns a read error. Now after that I looked at the old pcb and noticed on the back side that there where a lot more damage than I thought as the pass throughs on the bottom looked like they took some heat/ over voltage damage. With all the bad ones being on the side of the pcb with the smooth wall chip.




the model numbers off the drive.

6Y080L0
YAR41BW0
m6fya
80GB

So with all that said where do I stand.

What was the original problem, before you replaced the PCB?

Had your friend perhaps attached the wrong PSU to his external enclosure?

Are you & your friend accepting the risks of DIY i.e. you might turn a recoverable situation into a totally unrecoverable one, and the data is worth so little that this is acceptable?

What is your level of electronics skill?

Are you taking ESD precautions when handling the drive & PCBs?

Can you please upload a couple of close-up photos (don't need to be hi-res i.e. multi-MB), of the apparently damaged/overheated areas of the PCB (both sides), so we can see this?

Post exactly how it is detected

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Going a bit from memory here because I took it out of that computer already. So if memory servers me right the deivce manager hardware id showed it as being a maxtor 6y080l yar41bwo

1. Pretty similar to what it is now. Though I have no proof on read errors from before hand. As I just plugged it into his computer and was able to see that the disk manager could see the drive, but saw no volumes / partitions. So I at the time I figured there was some corruption in partition tables and didn't pursue it further. When I got it home my linux machine couldn't see the drive, which I figured was do to enclosure so I went and removed it from the enclosure and found a capacitor had come off and the solder looked like a cold solder joint. So I had him get a new board, which all brings me to where I am now.

2. At this point I am trying to figure out what is wrong and if its time tell him he needs to send it to a professional or if there is a last few things to try. ( aka i will not be opening this thing up.)

3. I'm no expert but i can be pretty handy. I can do some basic soldering when needed and have you basic volt and ohm meter. Though if needed I could probably get some time on the oscilloscope at my boss's / work.

4. I did the same things I do for when I am working on any other computer. Be it putting memory in a desktop or replacing a motherboard in a laptop.

5. The picture is going to have to wait a bit. The only camera I have right now is the one in my cellphone and that only seems capable of producing grainy pictures no matter how well light stuff is.

Thanks for the info. Hopefully your point (4) precautions (whatever they are ) will be enough - more than a wrist band is needed IMHO.

Your description about disk manager seeing the disk, but not the partitions (was all the disk shown as unallocated?), would mean that the drive itself was recognised by Windows, before the PCB swap. That's different from seeing something (e.g. the USB bridge) in device manager and nothing (not even the disk) in disk manager. This should mean that we're not seeing the classic "overvoltage damage due to wrong PSU attached to disk enclosure" scenario, but I didn't see an answer to my question about this.

The lack of clarity about the original behaviour, and the lack of photos (at the moment) means that I don't think I can offer any suggestions at this stage.

Life has been a bit busy and such stuff has been put on the back burner for a bit.

On the adapter front I have not idea if the wrong adapter was used or not.

Before and after board swap are acting basically the same for all I can see. With the disk manager taking a long time to see the drive and when the drive is seen, it is shown as being all unallocated.

Now when I try to see if test disk can find any partitions, it just throws read errors until its reaches its error limit and stops trying.