Need confirmation of burnt HDDs and other info

[PantherNZ]

Hey people, long time lurker here, first post haha!

 

So I recently purchased and installed a new psu (downgrade from 750w to 650w) due to surge damage. Probably the stupidest mistake I've wee made but to rewire my extremely tight pc faster I left the previous modular cables in place for my hard drives and plugged them in. After booting I smelt the horrible burning smell and immediately turned it off. I thought surely the only problem is the cables I didn't replace or it was a dead psu, so I replaced them and my pc booted. My SDD survived (with Windows on it) but to my horror all 3 of my HDDs were unrecognised and not even spinning! 

 

What happened was in my previous psu it supported 4xsata power on one cable whereas the new psu only supported 3xsata per cable. I assume under powering the HDDs blew them up? This seems extremely stupid, surely a hdd has a fail safe to stop it trying to run on insufficient power? Would be interested in hearing your opinions on this, have already ordered 2 pcbs to try do a swap and recover my data.

 

Another thing I am interested in knowing more about is the original surge: my pc crashed during gaming due to a surge, but after I was able to boot fine. It would then only crash after prolonged gaming (I assume the culprit being high power draw from the psu). Is this uncommon? I thought (and have experienced) that once a psu surges that's it, it's goners. Could an issue like that extend more that just the psu?

 

Thanks all! Have a great day

[NinjaJc01]

What PSUs are involved, as the cables may not have the same connections at the PSU end, and you may have put voltage the wrong way through the HDDs. If I am right, the SSD probably survived due to some circuitry which I won't go into (Diodes and things)

[iamdarkyoshi]

There is a very good chance that, as mentioned above, the PSU cables had a different pinout, feeding voltages where they shouldnt not go. The SSD probably did not use the voltage rail that was fed incorrectly to it. The HDDs however, their voltage regulators likely blew and took most of their control circuitry with it. The boards you ordered to try to recover data, be careful as each PCB contains calibration data that is specific to each drive. It might work, but it might corrupt the data as well. I shall summon @Captain_WD here to help with this.

[Smite]

12 minutes ago, PantherNZ said:

Snip

High power draw during gaming is a very real thing and can easily pop PSUs. I found this out the hardway using sli 9800 gtx's back in the day. my PSU would have all the caps blow sounding like a machine gun. 

Try to eliminate some complexity and try powering the system with only 1 hhd plugged into the known working sata power cable and data cable(where a ssd works). go into the bios and see if it is seen just like a ssd. It is hard to imagine a surge taking out HDDs as they have minimal power components. 

[PantherNZ]

1 hour ago, Smite said:

High power draw during gaming is a very real thing and can easily pop PSUs. I found this out the hardway using sli 9800 gtx's back in the day. my PSU would have all the caps blow sounding like a machine gun. 

Try to eliminate some complexity and try powering the system with only 1 hhd plugged into the known working sata power cable and data cable(where a ssd works). go into the bios and see if it is seen just like a ssd. It is hard to imagine a surge taking out HDDs as they have minimal power components. 

The surge was much before the HDD's were damaged. The surge problem / info is in regards to the previous PSU and the reason why I chose to buy a new PSU. 

None of the HDD's are found in bios or chkdisk etc.. As far as I can tell they aren't spinning which makes me assume the PCB is fried. 

 

1 hour ago, NinjaJc01 said:

What PSUs are involved, as the cables may not have the same connections at the PSU end, and you may have put voltage the wrong way through the HDDs. If I am right, the SSD probably survived due to some circuitry which I won't go into (Diodes and things)

The previous PSU is the Corsair HX750W: http://www.corsair.com/en/hx-series-hx750-power-supply-750-watt-80-plus-gold-certified-modular-psu

New PSU is: http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=120-G1-0650-XR

 

The Corsair PSU has Sata power cables that support 4 HDD's / sata power connections whereas the EVGA modular cables only support 3 Sata power connections per cable. 

1 hour ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

There is a very good chance that, as mentioned above, the PSU cables had a different pinout, feeding voltages where they shouldnt not go. The SSD probably did not use the voltage rail that was fed incorrectly to it. The HDDs however, their voltage regulators likely blew and took most of their control circuitry with it. The boards you ordered to try to recover data, be careful as each PCB contains calibration data that is specific to each drive. It might work, but it might corrupt the data as well. I shall summon @Captain_WD here to help with this.

Yeah this is what I am thinking too. I am aware that there is a ROM chip that I will need to transfer from the fried pcb to the new one, but was not aware of any risk of corrupting the data?! Can you supply any more information? As you can imagine, I am not willing to spend thousands of dollars to try recover this data but thought it wouldn't be too difficult to attempt myself? 

 

Thanks for the replies guys!

[iamdarkyoshi]

3 minutes ago, PantherNZ said:

The Corsair PSU has Sata power cables that support 4 HDD's / sata power connections whereas the EVGA modular cables only support 3 Sata power connections per cable. 

Yeah this is what I am thinking too. I am aware that there is a ROM chip that I will need to transfer from the fried pcb to the new one, but was not aware of any risk of corrupting the data?! Can you supply any more information? As you can imagine, I am not willing to spend thousands of dollars to try recover this data but thought it wouldn't be too difficult to attempt myself? 

The storage chip could have been blown in the process as well. But it may have escaped unscathed. I have done repairs on boards like these, getting the original board to work well enough to recover data and then scrapping them. But let's wait and see what the forum's storage guru says, @Captain_WD

[NinjaJc01]

3 minutes ago, PantherNZ said:

-snip-

The previous PSU is the Corsair HX750W: http://www.corsair.com/en/hx-series-hx750-power-supply-750-watt-80-plus-gold-certified-modular-psu

New PSU is: http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=120-G1-0650-XR

 

The Corsair PSU has Sata power cables that support 4 HDD's / sata power connections whereas the EVGA modular cables only support 3 Sata power connections per cable. 

-snip-

The voltage and ground connections may be different in the new PSU. The number of connectors doesn't matter.

[Captain_WD]

On 22.02.2016 г. at 9:08 PM, PantherNZ said:

~snip~

 

Hey there PanterNZ Welcome to the community from me too! Congrats on your first post!

 

I'm sorry for the situation you are in. Power problems can surely damage a drive beyond any recovery point. 

Swapping a PCB is something that we don't support and can't guarantee that it will work or if it will save your data. 

For the best chances I always recommend contacting a data recovery company as their services have the highest chances of recovering your data. Have in mind that these services are quite costly and you should consider if your data is that valuable or not. 

Another thing to take into consideration is that if a drive already has some sort of physical damage any test or recovery tools that you use might further damage the drive.

 

Regarding the power problem, bad or faulty PSU can indeed damage the drive (the PCB or any of the mechanical parts inside it). 

 

People who have swapped the PCBs have luch when using the same drive from the same batch and the same capacity and firmware. Again, this doesn't guarantee that you will have luck with this and this voids any warranty that the drives might have left.

 

Post back if you have any additional questions! 

 

Thanks @iamdarkyoshi for mentioning! 

 

Captain_WD.

[PantherNZ]

Just thought I would resurrect this with an update: I bought an identical replacement drive as one of the fried ones and did a pcb swap between them. I unsoldered the ROM chip and transferred it to the new pcb. Sure enough, this worked perfectly and I got all my data back. It was a little scary but it shows that if you aren't willing to spend thousands of dollars and don't mind taking a small risk, it can pay off! Still unsure to why the drives fried in the first place, Captain_WD I am not sure if you followed correctly but the drives fried when plugged into the NEW psu that was not damaged. The only difference was the power cable used to connect them to the PSU. Cheers

[iamdarkyoshi]

55 minutes ago, PantherNZ said:

Just thought I would resurrect this with an update: I bought an identical replacement drive as one of the fried ones and did a pcb swap between them. I unsoldered the ROM chip and transferred it to the new pcb. Sure enough, this worked perfectly and I got all my data back. It was a little scary but it shows that if you aren't willing to spend thousands of dollars and don't mind taking a small risk, it can pay off! Still unsure to why the drives fried in the first place, Captain_WD I am not sure if you followed correctly but the drives fried when plugged into the NEW psu that was not damaged. The only difference was the power cable used to connect them to the PSU. Cheers

Nice work! Glad the chip swap was successful as well as the data recovery!

[Captain_WD]

6 hours ago, PantherNZ said:

~snip~

 

Good job on getting the data back! 
Not really sure what happened with the drives. Usually this happens with a faulty PSU or a power cable. The drives themselves can't really burn from under-powering and if they worked fine in the previous PSU I'd suggest that the problem came from somewhere else.

Captain_WD.