Hard drive possibly fried, advice wanted.

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Girlfriend had an external HD which she lost the power cable to. I removed her hard drive from her external HD Case, threw it into my personal external case, and hooked it up. Next thing we know we smell that dreaded burnt electronic smell and from her memory, the drive felt hot to the touch, neither of us remember any noise associated with this, the smell was what caught us. I have not attempted to use either my external enclosure or the hard drive since then.

This drive has some 30,000 of her photos, half of which aren't backed up anywhere, so we have a large desire to recover this as safely as possible.

I want to make some attempts at recovery or at least diagnosis before we look at expensive 3rd party recovery options.

Drive: Western Digital Caviar Green 1.0TB WD10EAVS -00M4B0

Is this safe to plug internally to my desktop to attempt recovery or can I cause further damage? Any tips for diagnosing or narrowing down my problem or attempting to backup.
 
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D4 looks like it may be shorted. Remove it. You can simply snip its pins with flush cutters.

If R64 is OK, then this will be all you will need to do. The drive should work without the diode, but you will no longer have overvoltage protection on the +12V rail, so be careful.

If the board still doesn't work, then the SMOOTH chip will probably be dead. In this case the simplest solution will be to purchase a compatible PCB and transfer U12 from patient to donor. Some PCB suppliers will include this service for free. The whole job shouldn't cost more than US$50.

http://www.onepcbsolution.com/
http://www.hdd-parts.com/

Best of luck.
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getochkn

getochkn

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Jul 2, 2006
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Something burnt probably means the board is fried. You can either send in the board or order a replacement from places like this http://www.hddzone.com/


You could try just powering it first from your PC to see if you see any more flames or burning, but weird that it did that in the first place. SATA power is almost impossible to plug in backwards.
 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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Don't plug it into power again until you inspect the following 4 components:

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/bigcircuitboard_diodes.jpg

See http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diode_FAQ.html

BTW, you cannot just swap boards on your HDD. Each PCB stores unique drive, specific information in flash memory. This information needs to be transferred to the donor PCB.

Some PCBs have a discrete 8-pin serial flash memory at location U12, while others embed it within the MCU.

Is U12 populated or vacant on your PCB?
 
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Links to Photos

To the naked eye its everything looks decent. On the photos (my camera phone sucks at macro shots... sigh) D4 look a little funky.... and i think R64 looks okay?

U12 is populated.
 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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D4 looks like it may be shorted. Remove it. You can simply snip its pins with flush cutters.

If R64 is OK, then this will be all you will need to do. The drive should work without the diode, but you will no longer have overvoltage protection on the +12V rail, so be careful.

If the board still doesn't work, then the SMOOTH chip will probably be dead. In this case the simplest solution will be to purchase a compatible PCB and transfer U12 from patient to donor. Some PCB suppliers will include this service for free. The whole job shouldn't cost more than US$50.

http://www.onepcbsolution.com/
http://www.hdd-parts.com/

Best of luck.
 
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Solution
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Wonderful, thanks for your expertise and assistance Fzabkar.
 
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wongtmg

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Hi Fzabkar,
I have a WD My Book Essential 3TB External HDD failed. Basically, the lights did turned on but HDD not spinning. I pulled the HDD out of the casing and connect it to motherboard and the drive is spinning and detected by BIOS. I suspect it is a power fail. Due to the data being encrypted by the USB-SATA bridge board, direct connection to desktop PC wont get my data back. I intend to do the following and shall be most grateful if you could advise what are the risk involved:

1) Detach the USB-SATA Bridge board from the HDD.

2) Use a SATA Data cable to connect the 7-pin connection between the HDD and the bridge board.

3) Use a power cable from my desktop PC and connect directly to the power connector of the HDD. This basically power up the HDD.

4) Connect the 12V power supply from adaptor to the bridge board. This basically power up the bridge board.

5) Use a USB cable to connect from the bridge board USB port to 2nd computer (laptop) USB port.

Does the above setup work?

I appreciate your advice and help.

Thanks Fzabkar.

 
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fzabkar

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Sep 22, 2010
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@wongtmg, your plan sounds OK to me. I'd just be careful to ensure that all the grounds are common, but I can't see why they shouldn't be.

However, depending on the fault, there may be a neater solution. Sometimes an 8-pin dual MOSFET chip burns up. This chip switches +12V and +5V power to the SATA power connector under control of the bridge IC. The MOSFETs can be bypassed by removing the chip and replacing it with two wire links. When removing the chip, snip its pins close to the body with flush cutters, and then remove the pin stubs with your soldering iron.

See http://malthus.zapto.org/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=155&p=311&hilit=dual+mosfet#p311


 
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wongtmg

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Hi Fzabkar,
Thank you for your reply. I will try and post result here.

Thank for your advice.
 
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wongtmg

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Sorry Fzabkar, I don't quite understand what you suggested. This is my bridge board http://

Grateful if you can elaborate further by pointing out which chip and where to measure the supply voltage ?

Thanks a lot.
 
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fzabkar

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@wongtmg, your board appears to be the same as the one in my tutorial. Therefore your job should be straightforward.

That said, your diagnosis assumes that the bridge board is OK, but that it is unable to switch power to the drive. This would point to U6 as the culprit. Therefore, before doing anything else, I would first measure the voltages on each of the pins of U6. You must not slip with your meter probes as catastrophic damage will result.

I have identified the components on your bridge board:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/Essentials_bridge_components.jpg

If your board is working correctly, then you should see supply voltages at the outputs of the various coils -- L1, L2, L10, and L12 (near L1). These same voltages should appear across the adjacent capacitors.

L10 is part of the +5V regulator that supplies the HDD's SATA power. L1 and L2 would probably be associated with the Vcore and Vio supplies for the bridge IC. I don't know about L12, but it may be a low current supply of some kind.

Be aware that a common problem reported by WD users is a bad connection at the USB connector. You can confirm the integrity of the connector by inserting the USB cable and then measuring the resistance between each pin at the computer end of the cable and the corresponding pin on the PCB, namely the pins on the inboard side of the L3, L4, and L5 inductors.

Micro-USB 3.0 connector pinout:
http://pinoutsguide.com/PortableDevices/micro_usb_3_connector_pinout.shtml

USB 3.0 connector pinout:
http://pinoutsguide.com/Slots/usb_3_0_connector_pinout.shtml
 
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wongtmg

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Thanks Fzabkar for the explanation. I will follow your instruction and hopefully I can get my data back.

Thanks a lot for your help.
 
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Ianitis

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So 3 months later I'm finally getting around to doing something about this (aka the girlfriend is nagging me), I have a new TVS diode to replace the D4, though I'm not sure if I'm going to attempt this myself or find someone else to do it.

Today I go to snip the d4 diode and it tears up some circuit board with it on the way up, Pictures, is this an issue for soldering on a new Diode? Can I still plug the drive into my computer internally to back up data in it's current state? Is it time for a PCB replacement service?
 
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Ianitis

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Update- Got a new external hard drive to backup files to. Today I hooked the fried drive up internally and the drive shows up as unknown/uninitialized.
I'm currently trying various partition recovery software - Partition Find and Mount, TestDisk, and Minitool Lost Partition Recovery.

Any two cents? Will a pcb swap fix this issue or just leave me with an uninitialized non-fried drive?
 
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fzabkar

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Some external drives, eg My Book Essentials, are encrypted. If your is one of these, then you will need to reinstall it in its original enclosure.

Could we see sector 0 with a disc editor, eg DMDE (freeware)? Switch to Mode -> Hexadecimal. This will tell us whether the data are encrypted.
 
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Ianitis

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Not entirely sure if i'm using DMDE right, but here goes- http://i.imgur.com/K5cKYRN.jpg
 
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Ianitis

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Not entirely sure if i'm using DMDE right, but here goes- http://i.imgur.com/K5cKYRN.jpg
 
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fzabkar

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I would like to see the rest of the sector between offsets 0000000100 and 0000000200. That's where the partition table is located.

That said, "EB B7 09" looks like a JUMP instruction (which is what you would expect), but it doesn't look like anything that Microsoft uses in their MBRs.
 
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Ianitis

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Heres the rest of it. http://i.imgur.com/I5DWE66.png
 
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fzabkar

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The JUMP instruction was just a strange coincidence. Sector 0 is indeed encrypted.

The lines beginning with "A9 4F 5F A6" are in fact 16-byte sequences of encrypted zeros. These patterns are suggestive of 128-bit AES encryption.

You will need to reinstall the drive in its original enclosure. The bridge PCB inside the enclosure handles the decryption.
 
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Ianitis

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Bah, lacking the Power Supply cable for the external enclosure, its how we got into this mess to start.

How safe do you reckon picking up a replacement 12V AC Adapter (probably not oem, but close?) on ebay and plugging it in without the D4 Diode on the pcb is?
 
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