John,

On Fri, 1 Sep 2006 16:28:09 -0400, John Remington wrote:

> I recently lost a drive (7200 rpm 40gig Caviar) during a power brown-out /
> power failure.  I wasn't home at the time so I'm not sure about the
> condition other than what I heard . . .   people say the power dipped and
> peaked a bunch of time before going out completely (lightining hit a main
> transformer).
> =

> I didn't have a UPS on the machine that lost the drive (thank God I had o=
ne
> on my server or I would be in tears).  The drive has some stuff on it tha=
t I
> would really like to get off of it, but I believe the controller is cooke=
d.
> =

> What do you folks think the chances are of waking this drive up by
> purchasing the same model drive (off ebay maybe?) and swapping out the
> controllers?  Would there be more to it, like swapping some firmware chip=
s?

Depends what was fried.  My sister had a drive clobbered by lightning hitti=
ng a tree next door, and all it did was take out the boot area, permanently=
.  =

The drive couldn't be booted from (nor could a new boot sector be written) =
but the rest of the drive, and its data, were fine, and it's still running =

several years later with no problems.  Cut to the present - I had a drive f=
ail recently, in an external housing, connected to a network storage server=
.  =

It *was* on a UPS, and a surge arrestor strip, and nothing else was damaged=
, so it may have been nothing to do with power problems, but it won't =

spin up.  =


I measured the 4 contacts to the base of the spindle (I assume spindle-moto=
r windings) and all except one show less than 2 ohms between any of =

them, the "bad" one was apparently open circuit (another similar drive show=
ed low resistance between any pair).  I sent it to a recovery firm, who =

said that a head had failed, and offered to move the disks to another drive=
, and try to read it there.  But they wanted me to pay =A3220 =

(nonrefundable) for this work, and gave the chances of success as 30%, and =
would then charge more for the actual data recovery.  I'm not a gambler, =

so I stopped the process at that point.

In your case if it is just the controller electronics, and the heads, spind=
le and seek motors are OK, and you can get an *identical* controller board, =

then you may be able to get it going - but heads and their wiring are delic=
ate, so there is a chance they were taken out too.

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England



-- =

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