Maxtor HDD with burned PCB - Question

[joaoparaiso]

Hi there. I've got a Maxtor DiamondMax 10 SATA-150 non-ROHS compliant 300 Gb hard disk, model 6B300S0. The drive doesn't work because the PCB is damaged (has a burned chip).

I've searched for a PCB for my hard disk, but I couldn't find one for my exact drive. However, I found PCBs for 2 similar drives with very slight difference:

One for a 6L300S0, wich is exactly equal to my drive, except it is ROHS compliant;
Other one for a 6B300R0, wich is exacty the same as my drive, except it has an ATA-133 interface instead of SATA-150.

Any guess if any of those PCBs would work with my HDD? Is it possible that the PCB for the ATA-133 drive works with mine, and my drive becomes an ATA drive instead of SATA?

 

[bwnv]

It's very possible it would work, as long as the bad component didn't burn out the motor. If you can get it cheap it's probably worth a try.

 

[daveybrat]

Don't waste your time. I had the exact same situation with a hitachi hard drive that had a burn mark on a pcb chip. Ordered the exact same drive, replaced the circuit boards carefully, and still had a broken drive. It now powered up, but wasn't detected in the bios. After switching circuit boards back, the brand new drive was now dead as well. It's total crap shoot to get a circuit board swap to work, and it usually just ends in lost money and time.

 

[RebateMonger]

Myharddrivedied.com has links to free video presentations on hard drive recovery and physical rebuilds. I learned lots of new stuff, and one of the videos does discuss PCB changeouts.

Those videos won't answer your exact question, but you might find them useful.

 

[Laputa]

I recommend you get professional data recovery service if you have info you must have on this drive. Otherwise, I would recommending just buying a new drive. It's going to be a lot cheaper than pro. data recovery service. Even with the money and effort, you will also need consider a possible physical surface scrape right at the moment when the PCB blown out.

Each of the Maxtor drive has it's own firmware coded on the PCB and also on the drive's disc surface. Guess what, the out of factory defect lists are not the same for each drive. If they don't match, the info on the drive will take over if you are lucky enough to get the exact same PCB closely made within a week with everything else on the drive match exactly. Drive manufacturers wants to change the firmware programming code on the PCB every 2 week so they can make more money selling parts drives in the future. So your chance of getting the same drive with the same PCB is very rare. As for Hitachi/IBM desktop drives, the PCB will try to self-flash it when connected to a new drive. In a case where the firmware does not match at all, both drives will be dead once the self-flash process finished in about 10 seconds.