Fire in the hard drive!

B

Bobo

banned
Well to cut the story short, I bumped a power supply wire, shorted something out, fire, sparks, smoke, disgusting smell, and no more hard drive. So my question is, can I replace the circuit board on the hard drive with an identical one, and recover the data?

This is a Maxtor 250GB IDE 16MB 7200rpm drive. There are 3 big flat black chips (don't know what to call them) on the circuit board. There is a bug bump in one of them, and a bunch of brown around it from the fire.

I removed the circuit board easily, and there does not seem to be any damage anywhere except for that area. What are the chances that nothing else is broken, and that I can recover the data?
 
I really do need to fix this ASAP

Here's something that I found:
http://cgi.ebay.com/MAXTOR-DiamondMa...QQcmdZViewItem

which is a little cheaper than buying the whole drive.

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I don't know if it tells you anything, but the fire was in the small black square chip on the right of the two bigger black chips.
 
Same exact thing happened to me! My computers OS crashed, and I plugged it into a different computer to recover the files, but stupid me I plugged the hard drive into the molex which comes off of a fan (extremely thin wires, only meant for another fan). I turned on the PC and I saw sparks and a chip pretty much catch fire and melt.

If you can find the circuit board from the same type of drive, it should work.
 
That's the thing that I posted, is the board. But you say should work. I need a definite here. How sure are you?
 
Bobo said:
That's the thing that I posted, is the board. But you say should work. I need a definite here. How sure are you?
Click to expand...

I never did it before, or heard of people doing it before (but I know its possible), so I cant say with any certainty that it will work. But my best guess would be to make sure it's from the same exact model hard drive, not just a similar drive with the same storage capacity.

How much does that board cost?
 
The board costs $40 plus shipping. The hard drive costs $90 plus shipping. (if any of the stores around here carried it, I would have already gotten it.)
 
Well that's not what I'm sure about. How can I tell? There is no physical damage to the hard drive, but the motor might have been burned out. Is there any way to find out for sure?
 
you know the silver circle, some are black there are silver connectors like maybe 4 and if those are burned then replacing the board will not work because those pins have to be working.
 
you just need to find the same model hdd and replace the board. then you can just backup the drive and put the board back to the othe rone and you have yourself a extra spare drive.
 
there are no guarantees with something like that, or with anything to do with computers really, so you have to try everything. the circuit board should work as long as you buy an IDENTICAL replacement, and i mean same make model capacity and RPM
 
Well here's what I'm going to do. I'm heading over to CompUSA now, getting a 200GB drive for $35. I'll install Windows on that, and get everything set up and working. Then I'll order the circuit board, get my old hard drive working, transfer all the files over to the new one, and stick the old hard drive in an external enclosure, and use it for backup and file transfers. That is, of course, provided that the circuit board transfer works.
 
unscrew the board and look at the pins if they are burned or not. you need to get the board off cuz it is covering those pins.
 
I had already taken it off, and nothing is burned.

I went over to CompUSA, and got the 200GB drive, installed Windows on it, and it works fine. I'm just gonna use this until the new circuit board arrives, which I will be ordering tonight. Hopefully it won't take too long to get here.
 
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