HDD Failure

[GrandNebSmada]

So my hard drive recently had the magic smoke appear from its circuit board. I believe that the physical hard drive mechanisms and platters are fine inside the hard drive. I was wondering if there is an easy way to get the hard drive to start up, or if i could even take a circuit board off of a similar hard drive and use it on this one to get the data off? 

[jackchipm]

I have tried that before and it did not work. Give me a second and I will try to find the company that specializes in repairing the board.

[GrandNebSmada]

1 minute ago, jackchipm said:

I have tried that before and it did not work. Give me a second and I will try to find the company that specializes in repairing the board.

I took a look at werecoverdata.com but their quite pricey

[jackchipm]

 

1 minute ago, 5Beans6 said:

I took a look at werecoverdata.com but their quite pricey

Yea the board will need to be from a drive that has the same exact number. I found some at hddzone.com

[GrandNebSmada]

6 minutes ago, jackchipm said:

 

Yea the board will need to be from a drive that has the same exact number. I found some at hddzone.com

Never heard of that site before, but i think thats what im going to do. Thanks!

[djmoney]

I recently had a drive fail on me too.  Not a good feeling.  I though my online back up service failed as well.  This drive had all of the baby photos of my daughter.  So I do know what you are going through.  

 

On modern drives you can't simply swap out the board like you could in the past.  

 

there are 3 generations of drives.  

The really really old ones that are basically the same for every drive.  You could swap out even other brands and it would work sometimes.  

 

The middle generation where you could swap out the board but it had to be the exact same board from the same drive.  even the same bin sometimes.  

 

The current generation where there is a ROM chip on the board that holds information about the data on your drive.  You have to get a perfect match board then desolder that chip from your old board to the new board..  

 

Different brands implemented this at different times. so its hard to tell but I would bet that most drives still in operation today are of the newest verity.  My seagate drive was from 2011 and it was one that had to have its rom chip swapped.  

 

For me in the long run my online back up solution did not fail, I just didn't know how to full use it.  I found a recovery solution local to me and they quoted me 600 - 2000 USD to recover the data.  

 

Also Backblaze is $5 a month with unlimited storage.  look for a back up solution there are a lot out there and most are reasonably priced.