connecting external hard drive directly to motherboard

kennels

Honorable
Feb 5, 2014
1
0
10,510
Hi,

I recently had to power off my laptop while I was writing some data to an external hard drive because the system froze and wouldn't recover. After this, whenever I connect it, the external hard drive disk would not start spinning, although the PCB LED would turn on and indicate power. The external drive is recognized by the computer (Even with the name of the drive), but it says the medium volume is 0B which is expected I guess since the drive is not spinning.

I am completely unfamiliar with manipulating circuits and such, but as far as I read it could be a PCB problem, and there seems to be solutions in replacing the PCB but also having to move the ROM chip from old to new PCB. This is something I am not comfortable with and don't really want to spend $$ on having someone do it (and of course assuming the PCB is the problem).

The drive is a 2.5'' external drive, 500Gb, Buffalo. I've removed the drive from the casing (and discovered its actually a Samsung disk), and also removed the PCB.

My question is whether it would be ok to directly connect this drive via the SATA port directly to the motherboard of a desktop I have. Will it still recognize it without the ROM chip? I haven't done this yet as I thought not having the ROM might do something to the data I want to recover.

Apologies for the long winded explanation, and thanks for any advice.
 
I don't think it would be wise to power up the drive if you have removed the PCB. The PCB is it's logic board and the drive won't run properly without it anyhow. If you leave the hard drive intact, it should be safe to attach to one of the motherboard sata ports.