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Power Surge & Hard drivesFollow

#1 Feb 06 2004 at 10:20 AM Rating: Decent
Well I was messing around with DAOC last night with the free trial thingie to see what has changed, when out of the blue my system shuts down and I smell a faint burning smell. I try to reboot it but it just clicks on then dies again. Hoping it is just overheated (despite the 4 fans) I go wash my dog and come back. It is still dead so I get the power unit off my kid's system and slap it into my dead system. It now fires up but just beeps 3 times.

I take out my Radeon 9600XT (2 months old tops) and put in the old geforce 3. Ahhh finally it boots... but wait! It doesn't recognize the WD hard drives! I take the maxtor HD out of my kid's system and it boots up just fine with that.

So despite having a surge protector it appears that both of my HD and my Vid card and power supply got cooked last night. The vid card I can get warranty service on, the most annoying thing is that we JUST did our taxes and now all that data is lost. Is there any way to recover that data or repair those drives for a reasonable cost? AFAIK the media in the drive should be ok they just can't communicate with my system. Can you do a media transplant and move the guts of one HD into a new HD case?

/sigh

#2 Feb 07 2004 at 12:42 PM Rating: Excellent
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Ouch. that is not good. You do have a couple of options depending on the severity of the damage to the drive.

Most western digital drives have a small fuse on the controler board. Depending on your ability to find a spare fuse, and solder extremely tiny parts, you may be able to replace it.

If that isn't in the cards, you can swap parts from an identical drive chasis. The controller card should seperate frome the drive chasis, and have one or two ribbon cables leading fromt he card to the drive motor and the heads. Those drive cables should plug into tiny white plug in cables on the controller board. You can remove them very carefully. Do the same to the working drive, then plug the cables back in at exactly the same place. Then try to fire it up. If it still won't run, the spindle motor may be blown (very, very bad) or the head servo may be blown. (also very very bad.) Both those require a very high level of Drive mechanics to repair.

There are also several dozen data recovery companies out there. You can find them online or in the local area of most major cities. I have never used one personally, so I can't reccommend a good one, but they usually charge around $200-300 for a drive recovery.

By the way, if you had that bad of a power surge, your surge protector may have fused in the open position. Check and see if you have a surge protector garunteed by the manufacturer, and if so, get them to pay for everything. (assuming you turned in your warrently card)
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