Well, I thought I'd post this here in case anyone needs to know one way to fix a dead hard drive.
We had a hellacious thunderstorm come through a couple of weeks ago and with it the requisite amount of earth shaking thunder and lightning. I had my Dell desktop PC on at the time and we had a power spike followed by a brief black out. When the power came back on the computer appeared just fine (it is plugged into a surge protector which did not trip). A couple of days later after a few start ups I heard the clicking sound of death from my primary HD. It still managed to boot and the clicking went away so I ran a defrag and disk clean and it appeared that the drive was working perfectly. Two boots later, nothing. Clicking returned and BIOS wouldn't recognize the drive. Since this drive is partly backed up and doesn't contain anything mission critical I decided I would attempt to fix it myself. After searching the net for all kinds of advice (including some really bad ideas about heating and freezing the drive) I opted to swap the PCB board from a like drive and give that a go. $17 drive off eBay arrived and I swapped boards. Clicking stopped, drive spun, but unfortunately it still wasn't recognized in the BIOS. Bummer. I got a low-cost external drive enclosure so that I could more easily test the unit on another Dell laptop. And after many fruitless and frustrating attempts to get the computer to see the hard drive I finally found a site that explained that the 8-pin ROM chip from the failed drive's PCB needs to be swapped to the good donor board on some drives. Ok, this isn't the easiest thing to do correctly by a shade tree mechanic like me, but I gave it a go. You cannot use a soldering iron, you have to heat the chip contacts with a heat gun and remove the chip with tweezers. It's not easy and my first attempt failed to secure the contacts on one side of the chip. Luckily, and miraculously, a second attempt with the heat gun (modified with a snout made from aluminum foil making a narrow tip) secured the contacts when I applied light pressure to the top of the chip. Drive came back to life on next attempt to connect via USB. Proceeded to quickly copy any and all needed files. After all this, the rest of the weekend is pure gravy. <note to self: back up ALL of your drives, dummy> Figured I'd post this since there are innumerable sites referencing the control board swap but few mention the ROM swap needed for some drives. For reference this is an 3.5" IDE 160GB WD Caviar from about 2006. -Brendan -- "Photography's greatest handicap is the ease with which the medium as such can be learned. As a result, too many budding neophytes learn to speak the language too long before they have anything to say." - Will Connell -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
