Hard Drive Brushless DC Motor Controller

I have an old Western Digital Caviar 22500 hard drive that failed. I hate to see good electronics go to waste. I salvage almost anything.

I am trying to get the hard drive spindle brushless DC motor to run. What better controller than the one that came with the hard drive? I will save me the trouble of building one - these circuits are complicated. When I tried it, the motor powers off after about one minute.

It seems that the hard drive does its initial diagnostics and realizes that there is an error (no read/write heads), and powers off. I cannot figure out how to stop the motor controller from shutting down.

The motor controller IC is UCC3285QP. I cannot find specs on this part or similar ones with the same pinout configuration. I'm at a dead end.

Does anyone with knowledge on hard drive circuitry have any clues on how to prevent the motor controller from shutting down. I don't want to have a motor that's useless or expensive to operate.

Reply to
Andrew
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You can buy a used one from Ebay for less than 10 dollars. You could either swap parts or use it as it is. :)

Reply to
Gareth Magennis

I would still rather get the hard drive motor controller on the hard drive circuit board to work without shutting down. I would only pay extra cash if I had an immediate use for the motor and wanted it working right away.

So far the best I am able to get is applying a low voltage to pin 36 of the UCC3285QP. It stops the drive from powering down but now the motor speed becomes unsteady and more noisy.

It seems I just need to figure out how to prevent the UCC3285QP from knowing that it has to stop the motor, or get it to run independently from the rest of the hard drive circuitry. But lacking any data sheet or at least a pinout configuration, I am clueless.

Reply to
Andrew

I figured out a way!

I was focusing only on the motor controller IC. I then shifted focus to other parts of the circuit. I thought that if I could trick the circuit into thinking that there's a read/write head, then maybe it would not shut down.

I made a connection from one of the pins leading ot the read heads and connected it to a digital line that gives a lot of alternating ones and zeros.

It worked. The motor starts up and remains running smoothly. So I saved myself buying or building a brushless DC motor controller.

Reply to
Andrew

its really nice to hear.can u explain me in detail.iam trying to fix it since 1 month.imean trying to run HDD motor with out stopping.but no use. my HDD is samsung 20GB model.if u any other circuit which can drive HDD spindle motor ple help me thanks fever

Reply to
firoz16

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