Deep fried HDDs - anyone revived such beasts before?

[fuddam]

I recently posted about a deep fried mobo, where the PSU had done belly up (with blue lightning and all).

Replaced the PSU but system was still dead. Mobo a gonner. Just bought a very nice i7 3770k, 16GB Corsair Vengeance and Gigabyte mobo replacement, which is clocking 3.9ghz and 23C CPU temp, but can't get past the bios.

The original system had 4 HDDs, of which 3 were connected. 4th was offline for various reasons.

New mobo now tells me that those 3 HDDs are all deaded. Tried with external Magic Bridge connector and got same results. No activity at all when simply connected to power, whereas the 4th HDD is working fine on all systems.

So, is there any way to revive such dead drives? My brother is going to take various things apart (he's an electronics whizz), but wanted to hear from you.

Flippin' nasty that the original short circuiting killed PSU, mobo AND all connected drives - me going to cry. Maybe.

[Bagnaj97]

If the HDDs are all identical you may be able to remove the circuit board from the working drive and install it on the dead ones to get the data off them. It's usually just a case of a couple of screws and unclipping a ribbon cable type thing. As it was a PSU that caused the problem then it's likely to be a fried controller board - obviously this approach won't work for dropped disks etc. It also won't bring the dead controller boards back, but at least you can probably get your data.

If the HDDs are different models then you'll have to scour ebay, but the chances of success are lower because even with the same model of HDD there are sometimes minor board and firmware revisions.


After seeing your other thread, I hope you've learnt the true value of a decent PSU now! Decent ones have protection circuitry that should save the rest of the hardware, even if the PSU dies.

[fuddam]

You are indeed right about my new-found appreciation of a decent PSU, sir.



None of the drives are identical, unfortunately.

[b0redom]

+1 I've done this successfully in the past. It's a bit hairy, but it works in a push.

[Bagnaj97]

You are indeed right about my new-found appreciation of a decent PSU, sir.



None of the drives are identical, unfortunately.

In some ways you're lucky the PSU went bang. I once had a CiT PSU that appeared to work fine, except I was getting frequent HDD failures (which is how I know that this trick can work!). After 3 replacement HDDs I replaced the PSU and had no more problems. It could have been a string of bad luck with HDDs but, based on what others say about cheap PSUs, I doubt it. Voltages all appeared ok in monitoring programs, but that doesn't tell you about ripple or odd voltage spikes at power on etc. Cheap PSUs just aren't worth it.

[shaithis]

You might be lucky and find a logic board for the drive you have and swap them...but then I have seen motors fry when a HDD has had a power spike and that isn't going to be fixed...

[fuddam]

Well, am looking at data recovery specialists at the mo. Some of the data was backed up (all images etc) but not some office files. Unforgiveable, but it happens.

I asked for quotes from a few googled companies, and 2 of them phoned me back literally within a minute or two. Is the field so competitive that they need to do that?

Both the 1st and 3rd companies gave me the same "no data, no fee" spiel, one quoting minimum £195, and the other £97. 1st based UK-wide, the 3rd based out of Pall Mall in London.

The weird bit: they both gave me job references with the following exact structure: ABA00---

So, they must be fronts for the same company. Not unheard of, but quite an elaborate attempt to appear as different. If it wasn't for the job numbers, would have no idea.

Am wondering whether I want to use them, or another smaller company http://www.essentialdatarecovery.co...._Recovery.html which quotes £120 + vat regardless of issue, if data is recoverable.

Recommendations?

(I don't have controllers I can steal from retired drives. )

[YoloSwag]

Well if the drives make that burnt electronics smell it's no good, but that rarely happens nowadays, it just stops working and are forced to buy another.

By the way, how old were those HDDs of yours? I remember bringing my old Pentium 4 system to a repair shop, around that shop I see mostly some dismantled drives, some showing molds on the inside - I don't even know why bacteria would grow there but it was really thick! Hmm, maybe it was foam that helped reduced sound(???) Anyways, totally irrelevant since you said your drives were fried. Sorry about that

Anyway, have you tried opening one up? Just to satisfy that curiosity I really doubt those discs were damaged, it's most likely the circuit board of the HDD itself maybe you could find a way to short some circuits around that board... although I think it's a bit dangerous.