:-) ...don't give me any ideas, Godfrey. On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Godfrey DiGiorgi <godd...@me.com> wrote: > Cool, board level repairs. Next you'll be scraping the Bayer mosaic filters > off your DSLR sensor to build a Pentax Monochrom ... ;-) > > G > > On Sep 15, 2013, at 8:01 AM, Brendan MacRae <bpmac...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> 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 >> > > > -- > 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.
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