Hard drive repair

Has anybody repaired a hardrive? I have a quantum fireball 30 GB hardrive that
when my house caught on fire it looks like a small surface mount chip on the
printed circuit board fried. The board looks like it could be replaced. It is
on the bottom of the drive and the connector is attached to it. The drive has
essential data on it and I think I could swap it out and be back in business.
Anybody have any thoughts on this?
TIA
Roy

 

Buy an identical drive on eBay and swap out that board. It's worth a
try. I've done it before and it worked.

 

Well, we really didn't get much info. You said your house caught fire.
Now, was the said hard drive, in the fire? Why is the chip fried? Is it
because of the fire? If so, you are looking that the heat of the fire could
have damaged the Hard Drive (Warping the inside). Did the chip fry because
of water damage? If so, you may be looking at water damage to the Hard
drive, therefore it wouldn't work. Now, if it is a completely unrelated
issue, you may pull off getting another board for it. Give us more
information. We may be able to tell you if it can be pulled off. But if
either of the two examples are true, A shot may all it will be....

Rick

 

None of the hardrive is designed for repair. The manufactures don't provide
circuit and instruction of operation. It is a black box to users. Is there
any book that gives detail in hardrive and controler at all?

 

The fire did not reach the computer. The smoke and heat did. No water damage.
So I think I am going to give it a try. Thanks for the reply.

 

Dirty air will probably damage the platters before the board.

I know it's not good news but, been there done it and I got nothing good to
say.

Sorry.

JURB

 

I aggree with this.. but you have to find EXACTLY the same drive
same reference and exchange the two boards...
this worked for some of my customers some times..
the most difficult is to find the same drive.

good luck;

 

Suggestion: If indeed you get a controller board that makes the drive
function. First: Mandated: Copy all the data to a new hard drive. Second:
Fdisk, Repartition, and Reformat the original hard drive and use it only as
a secondary item until you know absolutely it will be totally functional.
Third: Have a go at it, nothing ventured nothing gained, Eh?? Good Luck
FYI: I've succeeded in doing a very similar thing to Laptop Hard drives that
have been questionable due to eithe thermal or physical damage and managed
to acually restore about 60% of those attempted, and proved them to be
functional over an extended peroid of time.

 

Can you post any of the markings on the chip that fried, or the chip
designation on the boards next to the fried chip?

Quantum got the "Fireball" bit right when they fitted a questionable
batch of Cirrus Logic chips ... which did quite literally burn up. You may
have been bitten by that failure. It was a chip connected with the platter
motor, IIRC. No platter spin, no working drive

 

Sometimes there is a PROM on board, and the manufacturer writes
device-specific stuff in it during testing. In that case,even
"identical" appearing boards aren't interchangable.

Isaac

 

This is more common on scsi drives. I think a large portion of IDE
actually store this info on the disk itself and the eeprom on the
board just has enough of a program to boot and load this info.
Different firmware versions on the boards can cause problems though.

In general, I've had about 50/50 luck swapping boards. I've even had
luck swapping boards between IDE models of different capacity (but
other wise the same model line).

-Chris

 

Its Probably TDA5247HT......by Phillips. We have a Service where you can
send in the Drive, and we can xfer the data to another Drive you supply.

We also sell the Chips, but out of stock right now.

http://www.technotronic-dimensions.com/quantum.htm


| In article <>,
| >Has anybody repaired a hardrive? I have a quantum fireball
| > a small surface mount chip on the
| >printed circuit board fried.
|
| Can you post any of the markings on the chip that fried, or the chip
| designation on the boards next to the fried chip?
|
| Quantum got the "Fireball" bit right when they fitted a questionable
| batch of Cirrus Logic chips ... which did quite literally burn up. You may
| have been bitten by that failure. It was a chip connected with the platter
| motor, IIRC. No platter spin, no working drive
|
| --
| --------------------------------------+-----------------------------------
-
| Mike Brown: mjb[at]pootle.demon.co.uk | http://www.pootle.demon.co.uk/

 

This doesn't work on the Quantum drives.

In fact, it's actually rare for this to work at all.


Odie

 

This is very much so the case in most drives.

Odie