I've been looking for weeks to a solution for this, hopefully somebody may have some insight

I have 2 old Maxtor DiamonMax Plu9 80GB ATA 133 hard drives. At one point they were raided and acted as my data backup drives. Along the way 1 of them failed to even power on, then shortly later the other one did the same thing. And by not power on I mean they literally would not even spin up.

I did some research (not knowing a whole lot about hard drives) and it sounded like this was one of a few things. 1) the platters were stuck. I opened the top and spun them and they didn't appear to be stuck. 2) the motor burned out, or 3) the PCB board was bad.

Well rather than spend 2 grand on a data recovery service I figured I'd try the $40 for a new PCB board. I found what I thought was a match. Here is a similar picture of the board http://i6.ebayimg.com/04/i/001/0a/65/8f6d_1.JPG. The codes on the chip matched (yellow circle in the pic) 040111300 and there was no chip at the red circle. and it was for my drive (Maxtor YAR41BW0, 6Y080P0)

So I replaced the PCB board and lo and behold the drive spun up! That was well and good for about 3 seconds until I started to hear this pinging sound. I opened up the hard drive again and saw the head moving back and forth and every time it hit that center spindle it would ping and move back. I took a video of what is happening along with some audio (sorry my camera didn't have sound so I had to do them separately).

http://74.220.202.37/~defenest/upload/hd.wav
http://74.220.202.37/~defenest/upload/P1010002.MOV

Now what seems odd is that both drives do this when I put that pcb board on them. So I feel this is a board issue and not a drive issue but I'm not entirely sure. Nor do I know what to do since the board is a match for my drives. Could this be a bad board? maybe the wrong one? I'm not sure what else to try. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks much.

Hello,

The board can be electrically compatible, but have a different version of ROM inside.
Additionally, your drive can have a bad preamp chip inside.
The biggest problem is, You have opened the drives.

I am not sure about You can fix this drives.....

Where are you based?

Regards,
Janos

You could have damaged those drives by opening them up and running them while open.

Boards are very easy to match on those models.

Before you have opened a drive you had a big chance of recovering your data for couple hundred dollars, but now it will be much more expensive, if possible.

_________________
www.datarecoveryne.com

Thank you for the replies. Not being very familiar with this process, I'm curious why opening the top would damage anything on the hard drive? I'd like to get to the point that the drives are recognized at all and then I can deal with any sort of data recovery.

n.c. you mentioned i could have a bad preamp chip, is there a way to tell this? And do I just need to try another board?

edit: also I'm located in Chicago, USA

If both pcb damaged, You have a great chance for preamp is damaged as well.
You can be sure, if You have enough electronic knowledge, skill, and you can measure the preamp chip.
As I sad, the biggest problem is, You have opened the drive, let the dust come in from the air, and let them to scratch the platter, and damage the heads.
Additionally, nobody can be sure, about You have not touched something inside.
(One bad move inside will cause a totally unrecoverable drive!)

Before this, You had a great chance, and low price, now You have less chance and much bigger price!

Regards,
Janos