When customers try to help . . .

[jono-ats]

Someone attempted to "repair" this drive.

Attachments

[lcoughey]

Chip-off recovery, it is then.

[LarrySabo]

Man, that's shameful. It's hard to tell whether chip-off is required; it might clean up nicely with a little flux and solder wick.

[jono-ats]

Man, that's shameful. It's hard to tell whether chip-off is required; it might clean up nicely with a little flux and solder wick.

Unfortunately, there are SMT parts suspended in the globs of solder. From whence they came, I know not . . .

Attachments

[LarrySabo]

Unfortunately, there are SMT parts suspended in the globs of solder. From whence they came, I know not . . .

That was clear from the picture. Nevertheless, I would expect that once the abundance of solder is wicked up, the SMTs and their original positions might become obvious. Comparing the PCB to another in good condition would make it obvious.

That's just me speaking from ignorance, but necessity is the mother of invention when one doesn't do chip-off recoveries. Maybe that was the other tech's motto, too, now that I think of it.

[fzabkar]

Nevertheless, I would expect that once the abundance of solder is wicked up, the SMTs and their original positions might become obvious.

I had the same idea. ISTM that it can't be too difficult for a competent tech to restore the status quo. It's certainly not a "chip-off" candidate at the moment.

Edit: BC? and BC4 appear to be the chip capacitors for the crystal (~10pF). There is probably a 1M resistor between the pins of the crystal.

Code:

             Y
             _
            | |
        .--|| ||--.
        |   |_|   |
        |   ___   |
        +--|_R_|--+
        |         |
       ---       ---
    BC ---       --- BC
        |         |
        |         |
       ===       ===
       GND       GND

[jono-ats]

I had the same idea. ISTM that it can't be too difficult for a competent tech to restore the status quo.

Unfortunately, I'm incompetent.

It's certainly not a "chip-off" candidate at the moment.

Oh yes it is.

[ddrecovery]

Lol. I think Jon knows what he's talking about. Probably stuff you can't see from the picture.

[fzabkar]

Obviously the stick has suffered physical damage. This suggests that there was no electronic fault at the outset. Clearly the user (or DR shop?) tried to reattach the connector, perhaps by using wires. In fact I believe I can see the end of such a wire in the foreground. There are maybe 4 passive components which need to be repositioned. I have already outlined those that are associated with the crystal. Such a circuit is STANDARD practice for crystals. There is NO reason at the moment for a "chip-off" kneejerk.

[fzabkar]

Here are several standard crystal circuits taken from various manufacturers' reference schematics. Is this really too difficult?

Attachments

UT310-S2_xtal.gif (8.35 KiB) Viewed 11442 times

UT165-L64_xtal.gif (8.4 KiB) Viewed 11442 times

JM20329_xtal.gif (7.95 KiB) Viewed 11442 times

[jono-ats]

Thank you for your help, fzabkar.

I appreciate it.

Jon

[jono-ats]

Well, I need to give fzabkar his props here.

The data was encrypted by Bitlocker, and efforts to reconstruct the data from the chip reads proved too difficult for the controller used.

So I reinstalled the two NAND memory chips, cleaned up the PCB by removing the solder blobs, and took some guesses about missing parts.

My reason for going with the chip read approach was to have a copy of the composite data, in case efforts to rebuild the drive ended up damaging the controller or the NAND memory.

We got 100% yield, including viruses.

[fzabkar]

Thank you for your feedback.

[jono-ats]

Thanks for your help.