Fujitsu MHS2060AT HDD Repair

Well, trick number one: Place the drive in a well closed plastic back in your fridge for a night. Prepare your (desktop) PC to accept the contents of the entire harddrive. (Enough free space to hold the entire drive's contents, in case all runs well :-) And a 40-44 pin adapter, connected to the second IDE channel.

Unpack the drive. Connect the faulty drive as your second harddisk and try to get as much data over as you can.

When a harddrive fails, it will fail very hard. Does the drive spin up?

Yes? Then look around for a controller board from exactly the same harddisk, swap the boards, copy the contents of the drive (if possible) and after that throw away the disk.

No? **** happens... :')

Well, at least it sounds (almost) right :-) Read: bag. Sorry !

I wouldn't bet on it. I've seen loads of Fujitsu drives go bad and it's invariably a fault inside the HDA assembly. Fujitsu drives are about the worst there is.

Dave

Thanks for the feedback. I'm almost certain that the fault is electronic. I can hear the drive spin at BIOS but it is not detected. There were no warning signs of failure. Some websites I've seen suggest that this was a fault on the controller chips which lead to BIOS detection problems without warning. Tried to find out more from Fujitsu but so far it is a wall of silence.

You could try mounting a Peltier effect junction onto the controller chip with a fan on the heatsink (hot) side, then run it for around 15 minutes so the chip freezes then try and power the drive. It might work for long enough to get the data off without freezing the entire drive.

Fujitsu drives used to have an annoying fault due to phosphorous in the chip encapsulation, this stopped the drive working but cold would sometimes help.

-A

I heard of the spontaneous chip failures due to the phosphor 'evaporating' over time. I think this was mainly the MPG series. I'm trying to track down more info on the controller chips but thanks for the freezing trick (seems logical in this case).

Hi I too have suffered a similar problem recently with a Fujitsu MPG3102 hard-drive.

Is the controller chip made by Cirrus Logic?

If so, I have found that leaving the drive for a while and then connecting it back to the computer should get it working - albeit temporarily so that you can backup your data to another drive before junking it. Try keeping the Cirrus Logic chip as cool as possible - perhaps attach a 'makedo' metal heatsink to it.

Fujitsu customer support were not very helpful and initially denied the problem with the hard-drive models until I forwarded a link to them giving a press release on the Fujitsu website indicating the controller chip problem!

I would strongly recommend anyone never to purchase Fujitsu hard-drives as their customer service is terrible.

Here is a forum thread detailing other users problems with Fujitsu drives - all seem to be related to the same problem:

http://217.115.198.3/content/topic/2190/?o=0

Some of the posts in the above thread mention updating the firmware to get the drive working however, I don't think this is permanent as the problem is related to the controller chip oveheating.

You're only chance is to buy another identical drive and swap the boards. This will allow you to at least get the data off the drive. Andy Cuffe

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com

Yes I seem to be coming to that conclusion. I apparenly have to ensure the same version of firmware and get as lose to the default settings as possible. There seems to be lots of test points so maybe I might be able to narrow down the problem. Many thanks.

Sadly I think the problem is permanent. It is a different chip to the MPG series (not cirrus) although I'm not yet certain as to what it is. Think I will steer clear of Fujitsu drives in the future.