Need to try replacing the damaged drive pcb and would like to find out if electronics inside the drive (head preamps etc..) are ok to avoid the possibility of burning the good pcb.How likely is this to happen if the drive was invisible by bios and would not spin with it's damaged pcb ?Any good trick -perhaps monitoring the heating with a thumb on motor controller chip or using an ohm-meter to check for shorted pins going inside the drive?
determining if hdd head electronics is ok?
Jan 07, 2006
2 Replies
They wont burn the good pcb even if they have got fried or damaged.
Cant happen.
You dont get shorted pins inside the drive and they wouldnt do any harm even if you did.
Its theoretically possible for a bad motor to kill whats driving it on the original pcb and the replacement, but in practice thats not seen very much at all.
You do sometimes see a situation where a board swap between two identical brand new drives doesnt allow either drive to work again, even with the boards swapped back to the original drive. Not too clear what happens there, most likey the firmware decides that its not on the original drive and chooses to come up again, even when back on the original drive.
Basically you need the drive's shcmatics and check the preamp. However, while possible, the preamp is a low-power circuit and has a low probability of damaging things, unless completely fused. There is no electronics in the motor.
You will have to risk it. This is advanced technology, doing it safe and on the cheap is not possible.
Arno
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