Hello all

Here is the situation, by accident I plugged my laptop power supply into my external harddrive.
I estimate a three volt over charge which was enough to knockout the external.

When the right power supply was plugged in it just flashes. No sign of life from the drive.

Interestingly enough, the External Drive was branded Maxtor, but when I opened the enclosure up I was surprised to find the drive was actually a

Seagate ST3750640A 750GB 16MB Cache 7200RPM hard drive.

Anyway I tried plugging the now "internal" drive into an empty spot but I get nothing (saved
I noticed a scorched type smell coming (apparently) from the area of the PCB board on back.

So, what are you more knowledgable fellows thoughts of a PCB swap being good enough to
get me running again? I'm thinking even if it works to immediately transfer everything to another drive.

What are my risks? Any resources you should point me to? Or should just prepare to sell my first born to the data recovery people. Anything else you think will be useful please share

Thanks to All!
Warmly
Dick

PS Does anyone know of a PCB source other than buying a whole drive?
PSS keep in mind its a Seagate ST3750640A
not a Seagate ST3750640AS I figure that "S" makes a difference, anyone know what it means?

Thanks again!

Hi Dick,
Hopefully your observation is correct and it is simply a burnt chip on the PCB. Sometimes this type of scenario can burn out the motor or damage the delicate heads but not always. The drive in question is pretty recent so I'm not aware of anywhere that will sell you a PCB alone. With seagate drives it is worth trying to match the firmware codes.

With some drives a PCB-swap can have a nasty outcome such as SA corruption (I think this is with Western Digital drives though?)

Also the S in the model number means SATA (Serial ATA)
PATA (Parallel ATA) drives just emit the S

Hope this gives you somewhere to start.

_________________
regards

John - http://www.dq-int.co.uk

Thank you very much John!..Sorry I was so long in responding, I was away for the holiday.

Uhmm what type of corruptions was that again?

Thanks
Warmly
Dick