I need drive electronics board

[Oldtimer]

A couple weeks ago my PSU smoked BOTH of my WD drives. One a 40gig 7200, the other a 13gig 5400.

When I tried to boot I smelled that electrical burning smell and it sounded that if the case were off I'd have seen sparks.

After opening things up, the case fans and the cpu fan come on but the drives didn't spin up. I tried different cables, swapping ports, etc. I had accumulated a new motherboard, psu and other goodies to upgrade to a P4. Swapped out the power supply but that didn't fix the problem. Jury-rigged the new motherboard and tried the drives on the new ports, swapping cables again, etc. She no go. Bought a new hard drive and the system (new P4) is working.

I removed the drive control board from the 40 gig and sure enough there was a chip that was smoked. One of the "legs" on one of the chips had blown like a fuse. I suspect that when the power supply went, it overvolted something in the drive control electronics. I've heard that it is possible to obtain these boards. However I don't know where. Can anyone steer me to a source? I'll check with WD but there may be 3rd party source. I'm hoping that the data is still there if I can get the drive to run.

Comments, suggestions.

Oldtimer Curt

 

[Lord Evermore]

You just find an exact matching drive and swap the good board over. Don't think I've ever seen mention of anybody selling just the boards, since they'd have to be coming from WD. More than likely WD will tell you you need to send it to them for repair, which you'll probably have to pay for. Don't know if they'd be willing to just sell you a new board.

 

[WarCon]

Probably just as cheap to try and find someplace selling that exact drive and just buy another to get the board. Only other cheap way would be to monitor the FS/FT boards for that model hard drive and get a used drive.