How to save a blown up hard drive

[prehensile]

Some dodgy power supply over volted a couple of 300 GB hard drives and smoked up a couple of the on-board components on the circuit board.

I'm sure all the platters are really good, I just really have to change the circuit boards perhaps with an old hard drive and I'm wondering if anyone has heard of doing anything like this before?

It looks like the only thing going into the platters is a ribbon and some power wires.

Certainly I will hold on to the hard drives to see when I can sort them out.

[SingingOrange]

yes it can be done.

I remember someone done it at work once. I work in Hewlett Packard storage department tho.

you need to buy an identical harddrive, strip the circuit board of the working drive, get your data. but then you already spent the same amount of money to get the harddrive working, unless the information is very important

[prehensile]

Sounds decent, in all probability it should be fine to do it then, I will wait around to see where to get the right hard drive, I will try and see where to get parts and all this, there's probably some place that keeps them in stock.

[Kumagoro]

This does work i had a HDD which had a blown circuit board. I couldnt find a replacement
on the net as it was quite old. Eventually through pure luck I came across one and
swapped over the board and it worked. I think the verision i used was the 40 GB model
when i had a 20 GB but it was the exact same family. Quantum fireball lm20 i think i had
and the one i found was a lm40.

The only time it will not work is if your HDD encrypts the data as it goes as it requires
the same board etc.

You could try putting a free advert in Micromart which can be done through their website.
Why not post the details on hexus and someone may have the same one.

[-ChEM-]

usually broken HDDS will have head and platter problems so you will probably have a good chance of finding one with an intact PCB on ebay etc, even if you get a new one now just to get your data back you could end up with 2 working drives

[SingingOrange]

usually broken HDDS will have head and platter problems so you will probably have a good chance of finding one with an intact PCB on ebay etc, even if you get a new one now just to get your data back you could end up with 2 working drives

its not possible to end up with two working harddrive, if he bought another one, since one circuit board will still be damaged, I am not sure if you can buy the circuit board by itself, but that would be better option