Melted Hard Drive (literally!)

Oh wise and wonderful goers of the tomshardware forums...

Im in a little predicament. A friend of mine formatted his PC as he was having some software problems, and with it went many years of family photos. So I said I would run some recovery utilities and see what I could get back, with hopes that a fresh vista install should not have overwritten the photos. Recovery mostly successful, I decided to take an image of the HDD incase I wanted to try more recovery utilities in the future (they all seem to vary in the quantity and quality of the result, but 5 different programs should get what there is to be got...), but this time when I plugged it in it went up in smoke. Lots of it!

I had been plugging it directly into the sata and power as a second drive on my PC. Im not quite sure what went wrong, the only difference was a different molex to sata adapter, but this is the result:

http://img8.imageshack.us/gal.php?g=p1020274h.jpg

Luckily it was after the recovery but I would still like access to it ideally so have been researching the possibility of swapping the PCB. Unfortunately this seems like a minefield of improbability - even if you find an exact match there is no guarantee. On top of that the HDD seems to be an american model as no UK auctions have the same PCB number.

So I was thinking - it looks like the chip at the top has blown and the path to it melted. What are the chances of getting a replacement and re-soldering it?

Anyone any ideas? Or have a spare PCB lying about I can try without having to buy a $100 drive from america.

Thanks in advance...

Do you think there is any risk of damaging the actual drive itself (head, platters etc) or is that a silly question...

So how old is the hardrive?

Has it been determined that the drive is out of warranty?

All hdd's come with a 3yr minimum warranty. Some 5 year.

Well if you do regular backups, then you dont have to worry about your data.

Putting 12 volts on the 5 volt supply rail will defiantly blow the capacitor, although hopefully the rest of the components on the hard drive might have survived. If you don’t tell them you did this then they should still honour the warranty. The question you have to ask yourself now is, is the drive worth the time and money it will take to go through the warranty process as posting the drive with the packing they insist on is not cheap, also don’t send the drive recorded delivery, normal postage will do even though they recommend recorded delivery as the extra cost is not normally worth while.