Drive electronics transplant?

[Galahad76]

The other day, my power supply blew and took out most of the components that were plugged into it - MB, optical drives, and, unfortunately, my HD, which I was about to backup. The HD is no longer recognized by the BIOS or the OS on another system, so obviously the drive electronics were fried. My question is, if I can find an identical HD model, would it be a simple matter of swapping the PC board from the donor drive onto my old drive to recover the data? If so, I'd rather do this than pay someone else with a clean room $75/hr to swap the platters or try and repair the electronics.

Also, how specific are the drive electronics? Would it be sufficient to just get the same manufacturer, same capacity, or would the model numbers have to be identical?

Thanks in advance,
Stephen

 

[Teq]

What the heck... it's already buggered, might as well give it a try

If you can get the same make/model/revision of the board you should be able to do this rather easily... Everything should be on locking sockets where you can just slide the lock out and withdraw the cable. Reverse the procedure to reinstall.

Use static precautions.

Be very careful about the head cables, they are delicate as all get out.

Don't take the platter cover off, one flake of dust and it's toast.





--->It ain't better if it don't work<---

 

[Galahad76]

I'm just worried about destroying whatever data may still be there by doing the swap. Anyway, the drive is a Maxtor 32049H3 (DiamondMax VL 20GB Ultra DMA 5400 RPM). These seem to be hard to find, so I'm wondering whether the electronics from a 32049H2 are similar enough to work. The drive specs between these two models seem to be identical except for the buffer size (although I can't even find a reference to the H3 model on Maxtor's website). The H2 has a 2MB buffer; the H3 has a 512KB buffer.

 

[Teq]

Well, the bottom line is that if you don't try this, whatever's on that disk is as good as gone anyway... unless you want to pay a couple hundred for data recovery services.

Are the drive mechanics between these two boards essentially identical (same heads/platters/sectors etc?) If so I'd be prone to give it a try. Usual cautions apply, of course.

But, in future... In your shoes, I'd be doing regular backups, especially of the stuff I couldn't replace.



--->It ain't better if it don't work<---