Reversed polarity on harddrive!

[casinogiant]

I was in a hurry trying to help a friend with a small form factor style pc. I had a bunch of simple apps on a backup HDD but he had no extra sata power connections. I found a IDE/sata splice and adapter and hooked it up. the connection went easy it was not till I turned it on that I realized it went too easy. The IDE power connection on the splice was backwards. After yelling at my friend I tried it back on my own pc. It doesn't show error or anything when hooking it up. Anything at all, like it doesn't exist. I am no armature and tried everything I can think of, I couldn't even find anything helpful on HBCD. That HDD was my total backup and was a Terra-byte of info I had collected (personal, business, and private) that 80% of cannot be duplicated or copied from anywhere anymore please help me... dot dot dot dash dash dash dot dot dot . . . - - - . . . mayday!!!!toddstay@live.com

 

[A Bad Day]

Assuming the circuit has been completely fried, you can go the expensive route and ship the HDD to a data recovery service.

Or, you can build your own clean room, purchase the same exact model of the HDD (to avoid incompatibility surprises), and transfer the platter.

Be warned that if it has multiple platters, you MUST make sure that the platters aren't misaligned even slightly, because data on multi-platter HDDs are split among the platters.

 

[Deleted member 217926]

Number one rule of computing. Make backups. Often. Then make backups of the backups. A hard drive is the one part in a computer that will fail. It's only a matter of when.

As said above a data recovery center may be able to help you. And it may cost over a thousand dollars.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hi there, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Well, when you reverse the 5v and 12v supply lines by reversing the molex power connector, bad things can happen to your PCB Hard drive components.
However if it's a recend SATA HDD, there are two overvoltage components that will sacrifice themselves to save the board. They are called TVS (transient voltage suppressors). The 5 volt one probably shorted leaving everything else OK!!!

There is an easy way to repair this.
The real expert in this field is Fzabkar, who checks this chat board regularly, and I'm sure he will spot the post and can give you exact directions how to correct it.

He always asks for a 6020 full number, so write it down, and he may require you take the green PCB board off the drive case (5 screws) to see the Chip components and make one easy fix. He will need the HDD Make and Model #, type, and size.

So all's not lost - have patience!

 

[unksol]

Assuming the circuit has been completely fried, you can go the expensive route and ship the HDD to a data recovery service.

Or, you can build your own clean room, purchase the same exact model of the HDD (to avoid incompatibility surprises), and transfer the platter.

Be warned that if it has multiple platters, you MUST make sure that the platters aren't misaligned even slightly, because data on multi-platter HDDs are split among the platters.

Um, clean room? Swap platters? no. No user would have any chance of doing this, and it makes no sense.

This doesn't even require opening the drive, you just buy the same model and swap the PCB.

 

[John_VanKirk]

Well, if it is just a shorted TSV, you don't need to buy anything to correct it.