Hello there everyone.

Im newbie, a new member here on hddguru forum.

I would like to ask about my Seagate Expansion Drive 1TB 3.5" problem.
I'm using this hard drive rarely just about a couple hours in a week and there is no problem with the disk itself. I've checked with HDD Sentinel when the hard drive is still running, and I found performance and healthy is on 100%.
The problem is when my brother used it for watching movies through the hard drive about two hours, the hard drive stopped working. Maybe the hard drive itself was hot enough to burnt the pcb. He was putting the hard drive on a carpet, i thought it doesnt have enough air circulation so becoming so hot and exploding the pcb.

And now, my harddrive is not spinning at all. My first thought is maybe the enclosure is the problem. so i open the enclosure and i put it on my PC through SATA port. But it still doesnt spinning. So, i dissasembly the sata pcb on the hard drive and i found one of the chip was burnt.

here is the picture

The question is

Is there anyway to fix the pcb with burnt chip like that??
I know to fix the hard drive is to replace the pcb itself, but i doubt if there any pcb like that to replace on my hard drive since i live on a remote city with lack of electronic things.

if im gonna buy it, where can i find it and what price range for that pcb? thank you very much.

The failed chip is the motor controller. It looks like the TVS diodes might be OK (the series inductors are not burnt), so I would check the resistances between the 3 motor terminals. If they are OK, you would be best advised to replace the PCB and transfer the "ROM" chip (25FU406B). Some PCB suppliers (eg hdd-parts.com) will do all this for US$50.

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is it possible if i just replace the pcb from the exact same model of the hard drive? i'll search the local store for broken hard drive with the same model.
it will be a hard thing to do if it is required to replace the ROM chip and I dont think there are any local technician could do the job since i live on remote town.

so, it is clearly impossible if somehow do something to the pcb and will make it work??
maybe like resoldering or anything else. because there was nothing wrong the way i'm using the hard drive (not mistaking any adapter etc) and i thought it just an air circulation problem that make the hard drive a little hot and burn the chip.

Thank you for any suggestion.

Swapping the "ROM" chip is mandatory on 7200.11 and up Seagates.

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To replace the PCB you have to match the Firmware of the old one to the new one. Either you have to get a board from an exact existing drive or you can send it off to a service which will match the board and copy the firmware for you. For a fee. fzabkar is the expert in this field and whatever he says is usually the best idea.

Really? So now does the drive work with a PCB that has the s/n of the other drive programmed into the "ROM"?

With older drives (7200.10 and below) then yes you could get lucky in doing what you suggest (getting exact same firmware board), but newer F3 architecture drives the info in the "ROM" is totally 100% unique.

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PC Image Data Recovery
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Seagate drives store their firmware in two places. A small portion resides in serial flash memory (aka "ROM") on the PCB while the majority is stored in a reserved System Area (SA) on the platters. When replacing the PCB, the firmware code in the ROM must be compatible with the firmware in the SA. Model series up to and including 7200.10 simply required matching the firmware between patient and donor PCBs.

Starting with the 7200.11 model series, Seagate HDDs incorporate F3 firmware architecture. F3 ROMs consist of several code and data sections. As before, the code sections need to be compatible with the SA. However, the data sections are unique to each drive. There are several "adaptive" modules which contain calibration data, including SAP (Servo Adaptive Parameters), RAP (Read Adaptive Parameters), and CAP (Controller Adaptive Parameters). It is very unlikely that two drives will have SAP and RAP adaptives that are similar enough for a direct PCB swap to work. In any case the CAP module contains the drive's serial number, so a straight swap will never work.

To understand the reason for the RAP and SAP data, see the following article:

http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_Tracks_and_Zones.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I would say be very carefull about sending your patient pcb anywhere for rom replacement. If it is lost, recovering that rom is an immense work, and there are not many people able to do that worldwide.

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