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Maxtor burns up

G

gwhsu

Junior Member
I just had a maxtor burn up a chip as described here:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=1038199
Mine was a 2-wk old 80 GB.
At first I thought it was caused by the PS but now I wonder if the drive ruined the PS. I don't really know about the PS because the outfit where I bought it just took it and handed me a new one.
I also lost a CDRW, and a new ASUS A7N8X-E motherboard. Luckily, my boot and Windows drives are SCSI with separate PS. The CPU and RAM were not damaged as far as I know.
What I am wondering is now that I have a new drive from Maxtor, before I return the old one, how much risk is involved in swapping the boards from the drives to recover my data? Could the mechanism be responsible for the chip failure? Any reasons it might not work? Formatting info in non-volatile RAM? Difficulty in mounting board?

Thanks,
gwhsu
 
Welcome to the forum! Sorry, I don't know the answer to that one. So, here's a bump for you ya till a guru comes along
 
I was successful in retrieving my data and then wiping the drive with the burned chip by swapping a good board from a Maxtor warranty replacement drive. I still don't know whether the burned up chip was caused by the power supply or by the drive. But even though others have had the same drive failure, and my PS was brand new, the PS still has to be the prime suspect.
To see what the burned circuit board looks like see the pictures at the link in my original post, mine looked just like that. Same corner of the same chip.

Answers to my own questions:

How much risk is involved in swapping the boards from the drives to recover my data?
Very little if you're careful.

Could the mechanism be responsible for the chip failure?
Not this time.

Any reasons it might not work?
Probably if the boards are too different, I don't know.

Formatting info in non-volatile RAM?
Nah.

Difficulty in mounting board?
Zero difficulty. Torx T-8 driver.

The first thing I did was hook a power cable from an old PS to the old drive/new board and turn it on without the ATA cable hooked up just to make sure the drive would spin up. After passing the smoke test, it was mounted it in a working computer. Then I copied all the data and used PM8 to delete and wipe the partitions, re-mounted the good board on the new drive mechanism with the new serial number, put the burned circuit board on the old drive that will be shipped to Maxtor and heaved $110 sigh of relief.

gwhsu
 
Sounds like you figured it out and answered your own questions. I do the board Swap all the time to save a poor friends data who never backs up anything. You never know, backups are very important if you have anything imporant to you on your HDD. As long as the heads, platters and motor are ok swaping the board from the same model drive has worked for me many times and I have never had any issues. Key is as I am sure you found out is just be carefull. Just recovered the data on an OLD WD IDE drive that had all my friends music he has composed for years on it and never a back up. Had the same drive here so just swapped the board. Came right up. Burned him CD's of all his data!!

Good Job gwhsu!!!


 
that's some wicked sh~t 🙂 First teh burn up of the HD and then the successful retrieval.....geeky 🙂 Never had probs with maxtors btw...
 
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