Has anyone replaced a Printed Circuit Board(PCB) on harddrive?

a couple of weeks ago my power supply on my computer went out, and it took 3 harddrives with it. One of the drives had about 95% of my Poser stuff.

After reading everything I can on the net, I might be able to get things back (maybey)

Has anyone replaced a Printed Circuit Board(PCB) on harddrive? and if so didi it work?

Thank you

Steve

How old were the drivers ? if less than 5 years they may still be under the drive manufacturers warrenty. Are you sure its the drive and not the motherboard controller ?

As I understand it the drive board has custom timings for the head tracking so is not a simple replacement , but its worth a try if you have a spare.

Never done it myself but it was interesting to check it out. The trick seems to be making sure you get exactly the right board with the right revision to match the old one. (40USD seems cheaper than +1000USD) Apart from that its just undo a few screws and mini block connectors.

Are HD warrantys going back up? Used to be 3yrs when I first made PCs but dropped to 1yr a few years ago when one of the majors had a vast amount fail.

It is almost absolutely impossible to remove those damn screws on a hard drive without specialized tools.  Tried and was never successful without damaging the drive.

I fixed PCs for about 20 years. Most companies consider the controller board and Hard drive to be an indivisible unit; if you have a warranty, you'll void it by removing the screws.

That being said, you can either -

1. Send it out to a drive recovery place, haven't done that in about a decade; so I'm sure it's not a $1,000/gig any more, but I bet it hasn't come down much.

2. Actually try replacing the board. You'd have to do a lot of digging to find the actual board; but it's mainly the cable between the board and drive that's the problem. As mentioned previously, most places sell the drive and board as a unit.

I don't know what the connection looks like, so if it's a Zif (zero insertion force) connector, you may just have to carefully undo the lock. 

If they have it glued or soldered on, it might be time to see the pros. You might be able to find the drive used; drive capacities and technologies change so fast, it's not easy to find old drives after a couple of years. There's probably a geek place out there that can help you out; maybe even a service that could repair or replace the board.

Good luck, hope they get you up and running.

Thanks for the infor

2 of the harddrives are in warranty and one is out

I think I will just send the 2 in for a replacement

Steve

About 5 years ago, I had a contoller circuit board on a Seagate drive catch fire. It was a common drive, so I bid on one on EBay that matched the various model numbers in tiny print on the drive. I then exchanged the circuit board for the one I bought and it worked. Seeing that my Poser runtime was on the drive it was worth the effort.

I could not afford the cost of paying some company to recover the data, and otherwise the drive was dead to me anyway. Obviously, I cannot say if this would work for anyone else, but I am not so clever that I could be the only one who has ever accomplished this.

lmk

Tried it once and worked for me. The company I worked for bought a bunch of laptops, of course, mine had to be the one with a hard drive failure. I took another laptop apart (same exact models, also, HDD models matched down to the firmware version), swapped the circuit boards and got it to work, got my files out, and sent it for warranty.

One person at Ars Technica tried it. Their mother and father bought identical hard drives at the same time from a small store. One drive lost contact with the computer. She backed up the other drive, swapped the circuit boards, and retrieved the lost data. But replacing the board did not retrieve the old hard drive's data. Backup everything twice!

Quote - Has anyone replaced a Printed Circuit Board(PCB) on harddrive? and if so didi it work?

Taking a controller board from one hard drive and putting it on another works great, as long as both hard drives are the same model.  I've recovered data a few times in the past that way.

It's really pretty simple.  The board must be the same, but if you can handle a screwdriver and maybe a soldering and desoldering tool it's no big deal.