Hard drive repair (longish)

Hi PlainBill...

Just a shot in the dark with the first thought that comes to mind, if I may?

Would it be worth the effort to try telling the old drive/new electronics combo how big it is? Instead of letting it tell bios?

Good luck recovering the pics of your grand daughter's; know it would devastate me...

Ken

Well the first bit of advice is to *not* buy Maxtor drives as they've been some of the least reliable I've dealt with, obviously that's no help now though.

You could try replacing the motor driver IC, it's usually a square 44 pin or so SMT chip, replacing it requires some care and skill but it's doable.

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        Home Page: http://www.seanet.com/~jasonrnorth

That was a fix that worked with very old drives (like 15-20 years old) that suffered from "stiction" but this is no longer an issue, these Maxtor drives burn out the motor driver chip, no amount of spinning and whacking it around will make it spin up.

that

drives

around

Drill a hole in the side and blow compressed air in ?

I did see the techs once try to erase a hard drive with a bulk eraser.

N

I'm sure there's some reason this is a stupid idea, but what if he were to remove the disks from the old drive & carefully insert them into a working drive? Maybe he could pick up a used example of the one that has failed at a local used pc place & give this a try. I've always supposed that something along these lines must be what done by those places who obtain data from drives which have been in fires, run over, etc., no?

Dan

NSM wrote:

I bet it worked, too! Probably a bit better than they hoped :^)

Eric Law

This is a long standing fictional piece of work. The platters cannot be removed from one hdd and read in another - even an identical hdd.

The other work of fiction, electron microscopy.

someone2

Ken,

That would be the ideal solution - while I can solder, I'm a lot better working with an IC with the pins on .1" centers than smt parts

- not that there's anything wrong with smt. Now if you would happen to know of a source for the software used to program these drives...

PlainBill

James,

I tend to agree with you on Maxtor drives, but I have several around that have been working perfectly for more than 3 years. As far as replacing the motor IC... Well, there's a problem. I'm competent when working on a standard DIP package with pins on .1" centers. I think I could handle the flash chip with 8 pins on .05" centers. I'm sure I'd be out of my depth on a chip with 64 pins on .03" centers.

PlainBill

In this case it isn't a 'stiction' problem. The failure is in the controller, not the hda. I usually leave the computer on 24/7, but it's kind of hard to replace the motherboard with power on. In this case, the drive worked perfectly after the motherboard was replaced; i went belly up when I moved it (power off) from the workbench to the computer desk.

Pla>It's sometimes possible to restart a drive that won't spin up by

There are a few problems with the idea. The number one problem is my lack of mechanical dexterity. I'm OK on things like sparkplugs, lug nuts, and assembling kid's wagons, but when I get down to the really delicate stuff, I'm SOL.

Picking up a used drive isn't likely - Maxtor just went into production with this line. A new drive wouldn't be impossibly expensive; as a matter of fact I have on right here! The problem is the electronics board contains SOMETHING about the characteristics of the drive. With 1 million bit serial chip, it could be a LOT of information.

What you describe is pretty much what a data recovery place would do. However, they presumably have the capability of matching the controller characteristics to the drive. I don't.

Pla>I'm sure there's some reason this is a stupid idea, but what if he were

Hi PlainBill...

I was thinking of a much simpler solution... and one that wouldn't run the risk of doing damage to the new controller card and getting Maxtor upset in the process...

What I'd consider trying is to go into bios, and rather than letting bios auto-detect the drive, instead entering the heads/cylinders etc info yourself.

The downside to this is that you'd have to somehow get the info first... from either Maxtor if they'd tell you, or someone else who had a similar drive that does report the

203.9 size correctly.

Another thought that came to mind since the first post... Maxtor's have drive limiter pins on them... not possible that it was on one but not the other? I can't recall which it is, but it's definitely one of the "end" ones. Look at the little data sticker. One end pair will be marked as the master/slave or something; the other end pair won't even be mentioned. That one will be the size limiter. Might be worth a shot.

Good luck.

Ken

The EEROM has a map of bad sectors when the drive is low level formatted at the factory. Changing the chip won't help unless both drives had exactly the same bad sectors at the time they were formatted.

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Inspect all the SMD chips for hairline cracks and loose solder balls under the leads. You might get lucky and repair the board. Did Maxtor offer any guarantee to attempt to recover data from a drive that's still in warranty?

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

I've had bood luck with the Diamondmax series, but I have seen plenty of their cheap drives go bad. The drives they sell to Compaq etc. are the low end, and I really do think the Diamondmax drives have better quality control.

IMO WD drives are the worst. Clunk clunk clunk. Its probably one design flaw that's not easy for them to change, but who cares WHICH part causes you to lose your data.

Now that I think of it, I've only seen one bad Seagate, and it was spindle bearing sticktion you could whap it on the side just right and it would work fine. This only happened when the drive got cold and it was about 8 years old at the time.

Seen one new bad Diamondmax, but honestly, I dropped it. It was only from a height of about 1", but it hit a very thick and firmly supported glass table. It hit right on the bottom.

Yes I have seen a few bad Maxtors, but they were not Diamondmax, they were all either the kind you get from OfficeMax or something, or OEMs in a Compaq or an Emachine or something. On the other hand I've seen alot of WDs bad in 3 years, sometimes sooner. I lost some irreplacable data on one of them and swore off of WD forever. If the Diamondmaxes start failing me I'll go with Seagate, unless you have a better suggestion.

JURB

Not stupid, but unworkable. Some things are determined by individual tolerances of mechanical parts. If you could lowlevel format the drive you might use the platters, but this does not retrieve lost data, it erases everything.

Opening the platter chamber in a HD requires a clean room, or close to it. I read once they had a running HD open somewhere and simply blowing cigarette smoke at it caused it's immediate failure.

Now I know why they have air filters.

URB

I've got piles of bad hard drives, and they cover a wide swath of manufacturers. All of them have had bad models. I recently scrapped 25 Seagate 1004 hard drives that had been rebuilt and failed a second time. If you listened to everyone, you would be afraid to use any hard drive.

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Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

Yes, but in a relatively clean office environment, they won't die instantly.

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