Ok, I have confirmed that one of the TVS on my board is shorted (thanks radioshack) and I want to try to remove it. What tools would people suggest to use?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Talking about stores in the US, as a general rule, the guys in Radio Shack are idiots. However, if you really trust them for some reason, or if something else leads you to believe the TVS is shorted, a soldering iron is likely the best way. If you're not good soldering, you might make more of a mess, and you might be better off just cutting it out, gently, with small cutters. You don't even have to remove it if you break the TVS completely in half, and just bend the ends up.

Use two pencil soldering irons (one on each end), and just lift it up and out.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

Radioshack=Highschool students=Don't trust the employees

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Buy your friends Toshiba\Hitachi and your enemies Seagate.

Dear G*d, I didn't mean the people there, I meant their multimeter.

Anyway Radioshack went out of business in Canada about 5 years ago.

As everyone else has said; radioshack for testing...not sure about that.


But if you want to remove it, use a hot air gun ~500F and a good pair of esd safe tweezers, obviously remove the board from the drive, and then place it on a piece of cardboard and then focus the heat near the tvs, make sure that you arn't hovering the heatgun over/ really close to the plastic connectors...they will melt (obviously). This is safe for the pcb because they bake them during manufacturing process at similiar temperatures, so the components are specced to take the heat, for a short amount of time. Should only take ~20 to 30 seconds of focused heat to lossen the solder enough to remove the tvs with the tweezers.

Thank you all, I am happy to report with the TVS removed the drive spun up, and I am now recovering the data from it.

You all saved me $1700, thanks.