At 02:50 PM 1/22/03 +0000, you wrote:
>Has anybody had any experience with the SMPS on their PC exploding?
>
>This has happened to me and it seems to have fried most of the PC.
>
>The most valuable/least easily replacable part of the system is my hard-drive.
>Although I've kept back-ups of most of the important data, it would be nice to
>think I could rescue my
>existing drive.
>
>Three questions
>
>1. What damage would a massive spike (such as that caused by a SMPS going
>bang)
>do to a HDD?
>      Dead controller board, dead drive platters or both?

Probably dead controller board, *but* there's a chip right in by the heads
on some drives AFAUI, and if that's gone..

>2. If it's just the controller board that has gone, then could I swap it
>with a
>known working board form an identical HDD?

That's one of the procedures that the pros use. Personally, fixing HDDs isn't
my business, so when this happened to me, I went to a professional data
recovery outfit, shelled out the bucks (about $800) and they both recovered
the data and put it on a new HDD, and I was off and running. I knew it was
confined to the controller board (a chip self-destructed on 6 month old
Maxtor,
very strange), but when I calculated the time and risk, using the pros was a
no-brainer. The outfit I use doesn't charge if they don't recover data at the
Level I service (cheap). At higher levels (which I would not have used as I
had 99.9% of the data backed up properly) they figure the chances are poorer
and they charge for their time. These guys wear white smocks like doctors,
and I trust them about as much (maybe more).

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

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