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Flaming Hard Drive!

S

spartacus321

Senior member
Ok so I'm happy I did'nt burn the house down for starters.

I have an old IBM Aptiva PC and the power supply went dead. I removed it and replaced it with a spare 300W Power Supply which I had lying around. It couldnt exactly fit in the same case, but I just wanted to make sure the PC still worked.

And then it happened. About 2 or 3 seconds after powering on the system, a small flame appeared on the underside of the hard drive.

I immediately switched the system off...


Did I damage the hard drive because of the power supply I tested it with? (it's ATX, the old was 100W, the one I tested with is 300W), or could there have been some other possibility linked to this?

All my other PCs are plugged into a UPS, this one has always just been on a cheap surge strip.
 
Was that "spare" ATX PSU, one out of an old Dell system or something? Because those have non-standard ATX pinouts, even though they use the same physical connector. Could have fried something if so. If not, I have no idea. Maybe it was just that HD's time to go. Sorry.

 
The ATX spare PS I used was out of another case which I bought about a year ago, a Codegen case I believe.... definitely not from a Dell.

I'll try posting a pic of it later 😀
 
I suppose you meant spark. That coulda been static, or something real dangerous like a current leak from the mains. I would say the PSU is the culprit.
 
Well when I removed the outer casing of the PC the only contact I made with the inside was pulling out the power connectors of the old PSU and inserting the connecters of the PSU for testing.

After about 2-3 seconds a small flame appeared on the underside of the hard drive, sort of like when you strike a match and it lights then the flame becomes smaller. Thats when I just pulled the power cord right out before anything else happened.

CD Rom drive no longer works now, no power goes to it.

So it seems like that PSU really messed things up.

Oh well the system was pretty old and dying anyways hehe.
 
Did some digging and it seems like this line of hard drives from Quantum has had it's troubles....

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/ser...75&threadId=116479


The circuit board easily unscrews from the drive, so it's now time to hunt around to find someone with the same drive for sale.

So far the onl places online are selling in excess of $100US which is madness, but i'll keep checking eBay frequently.

The model is LB15A011, if anyone has a drive as such and is willing to sell please let me know 🙂
 
To be safe I wanted to get the same model drive in order to swap circuit boards, allowing me to pull data off the damaged drive.

From what I read in the forum which I posted to link to above, the safest bet was to get a matching drive.

I was able to get something very similar on the For Sale/Trade forums here, so I will see how it goes when it reaches.
 
yeah, I just read that, silly me. Good luck, I had an aptiva a while ago, but I had a quantum bigfoot harddrive, that thing is a BEAST! (get it?!)
 
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