hard drive not powering up - change circuit board?

you need to get an identical harddrive. chances are it will not work... but if you are careful...you won't hurt anything to try. you can put the board back in the good drive when you are done with your experiment

Do I need to ask? What the heck, I'll ask. Have you confirmed the problem isn't in the wiring or connector to that particular drive? That is, have you check for proper voltage with a meter or plugged in a different drive on that connector? Also, if you've disconnected and reconnected the drive a number of times, the solder joints on the drive's power connector could need reworking. Check the obvious stuff first before jumping into swapping boards.

Of course, if you've already done those checks, you'll have to either troubleshoot the drive to the component level (and then find replacement parts) or start swapping boards. One word of caution on this, though. Don't assume that just any board from the same model drive will work. Sometimes they do, but often the drive's firmware won't be an identical match and the swapped board either won't work right or may even cause damage. For example, here's someone selling boards for your drive; note their warning:

Then again, the prob may not be the board. It could be other things, such as a bad platter motor, though that's less likely.

Strike that. Part of the platter motor assembly is actually part of the main board on IDE drives. This is what I get for reading newsgroups right before I hit the hay. 8-/

Strike that, too. omg, forget I ever mentioned platters. The rest is on-target, though.

thanks! what were the chances of a board for that particulat model of hard drive being on ebay!! .(though that Fujitsu MPG3* range is notorious. ) PCB isn't cheap though. but i'm glad i know the option is there. what would i do usually to find a PCB? just try to find the excact model of HDD on sale? seems like pot luck.

yes, exact HDD model, exact PC-board, down to the same version nbr. I had to do it once with a 20Mb drive. The board got wrecked with an external interface to the PC. But get a 2nd HD to copy your data too. rw

No it's not, I've successfully swapped a dead board on an IDE drive a few times, though they were older drives. Give it a shot, it might work.

in article snipped-for-privacy@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk at snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.co.uk wrote on 11/20/05

Well, if you are going through the trouble of SMT component-level repair, why not swap the EEPROM, too?

Because anyone with the right-sized screwdriver bit can swap a drive circuit board, requires minimal tools, skill, or risk. Swapping EEPROM is exactly the opposite.