I have a 400g Seagate 7900.9 sata drive that crapped out. It overloaded my powersupply and killed it. I found that out through trial and error and then using an external enclosure that the drive would not spin up and the power leads got very hot. My goal is to recover the data if possible.

I aquired a working exact matching donor drive and swapped the PCBs. The drive now spins and runs in my PC but the bios gets locked up. In the external enclosure it is never seen via USB.

Any ideas what else I can do. I really want thes data as it is home video captures of the kids I wanted to save.

Thanks,

Barry

Some soldering will need to be done (well there is ways without soldering, but you need professional grade tools)

Unfortunately simple PCB exchange no longer works like it did on drives 10-15 years ago, things have gotten more complicated now.


You need to transfer the EEPROM to the new PCB, if you damage the EEPROM in the process your recovery will get MUCH more difficult if not impossible.


Regards,

If your lucky its just one of the two TVS diodes blown (shorting) on the original board
and they can be replaced (or even removed entirely if you are prepared to risk it)

Else will need a PRO to help you set up the new PCB

I was an electronics tech in the Navy and got my degree in electronics engineering, but in electronics time it was light years ago....but I can still solder like a champ. If I know what to replace I can do it, except for thoses 2 large ICs. I don't think I could do those with my personal equipment.

Here are a couple pictures of it

The two TVS diodes are near the SATA power connector.

I can't be sure, but the EEPROM appears to be the 8-pin chip in the top RH corner.

See the following article for help in identifying the components.

HDD from inside Main parts:
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

Here are my scratchpad style notes:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_ICs.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diodes.txt

I found my shorted diode and will replace it tonight. I will post back results.

Thanks guys

Well, I decided to clean the head contacts on my original board as they looked rough and got a bit carried away. The pads disintigrated so swapping the diodes was no longer an option. I then pulled the upper RH 8 pin chip from the original board and put it on the new board and was able to run the old drive with the new board. Thanks fzabkar for that tidbit.

Thanks you all for the advice.

Barry