Is this hard drive really dead?

[jediphx]

I took one of my laptops apart to fix the Touchpad and I was putting the last of the bottom screws back in and must have used the wrong screw because it left a scratch on the pcb on the underside of the hard drive. Now regardless if the HD is in a laptop or external usb case it is not recognized. Could this little mark really kill the whole drive?


http://picasaweb.google.com/lh...eXgxAE&feat=directlink

 

[Modelworks]

Hard to say I can't see the area all that well.
Those little copper circles are through hole connections. Circuit boards are made up of layers , like a cake, and those circles connect different layers. The large green areas around them are ground planes, designed for blocking RF noise. If you have caused a short between one of the circles and the ground plane that could make a drive stop working. I would get a magnifying glass and look closely. Make sure no copper has been scratched over to the circle and the ground plane that doesn't belong.

 

[ahenkel]

If the controller board is damaged beyond repair is it cheaper to buy a new drive? Or could the OP get a new controller board to salvage the data. I've replaced controller boards on standard HD's but never laptops

 

[faxon]

generally the only way to get said controller board is to get another drive and swap the boards out. if the drive is good/new enough to warrant buying another of the same drive anyway, that's probably the easiest course of action. copy all the data from the drive using the other controller board onto a different drive, then swap the controller board back and RMA the drive with the bad board for a replacement. once that's done you can put the RMA drive back in and return the one you got, assuming it's still within the return policy. fry's has a 30 day return policy on their hard drives (new in box), but there might be some online stores which have longer ones. the trick will be getting the RMA in, processed, and returned before the return policy expires. alternatively, you can just use the drive in an external inclosure as backup storage in case something else bad happens to that drive

 

[Modelworks]

Most of the newer drives cannot swap boards. When they are first booted at the factory the board customizes itself to the drive it is installed on. That config is written onto the drive itself and tied to the flash on the board. If you take that same board and place it on another drive, even the exact same model, it will not work because it expects the config to be the same as the old drive. By making each board custom to the drive it is installed on they increased reliability. Before this the drive ran a generic program for all drives in that model. Now each board is custom to the drive .