yea if i cant find someone round here who can do it for cheap, i prolly will send it to you. so what are the chances that this will actually fix my problem, at least long enough for me to pull my data off it?

Any young TV technician (with reasonable eyesight) can swap the EEPROM for you.

The preamp is inside the casing. To understand what's required to replace it, look here:

Head Stack Replacement: Questions and Answers (Author: Stanislav Korb):

http://hddguru.com/content/en/articles/ ... k-Q-and-A/

ok, so how does that guy think that 80% of the preamp is gone if he cant see it?

Because GURUs are GURUs. Period.

haha right, so its kinda one of those things that tends to happen with these drives?

Most people posting to this forum are not native English speakers.

When he says that "unfortunately, 80% your preamp is gone", he actually means that there is an 80% chance that your preamp has been damaged, not that 80% of it has been damaged.

o ok that makes more sense. does that tend to happen a lot when the pcb gets burned out or something?

I'm not in the DR business, but I'd say 80% is a lot ... ;-)

any clue what causes that to go out just bc some other piece goes out?

Mr.BlackST

fzabkar: that's actually what I mean

Again, I'm not a DR guy, but I believe the motor controller chip generates the negative supply rail for the preamp. The damage to the controller looks to be in the vicinity of the spindle motor phase drivers, but perhaps this also spikes the supply rails to the preamp.

I'm just guessing, though ...

gotcha, that makes sense....well i guess i just have to cross my fingers and hope that i can get this thing going at least long enough to yank all my data off, then it can die and rest in piece haha

got the new board and everything is working perfect now. transferring all the files over to another drive, but it did work with just the board.

i also want to say thanks to HDDMANIA for doing the swap on the boards for me. great job