On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Sean Breheny wrote:
> You can get off-the-shelf brushless sensorless motor drive ICs
> (Phillips makes one, I'm sure others do, too).

Surface mount parts are a problem for me.. I have never been able to 
not destroy any SMD part I have touched with a soldering iron.  :-)
Maybe one of the chips has some sort of starter kit available.

> I would think that the easiest way would be to cannibalize this out of
> another drive and put it into the one you are using, OR try to repair
> the one you have. If it is as simple as two power supplies not being
> present at the right voltage, then you may have just damaged a voltage
> regulator or blown a protection device (like an SMD fuse).

The biggest problem I have found with the integrated motor controlers on 
hard drives is that they tend to shut down the motor if it can't read data 
off the disk via the heads or for 100 other reasons.  This particular 
board was nice because I located the pin to the controler chip to keep the 
drive spinning.

> What is a "vip" in the context of a hard drive? Very Important Parts?!

Heh, I like that.  Actually, it's just a typo.  I meant to say 'chips'.

--
Ian Smith
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