A guy at work has stuffed a Seagate HDD when installing a DVD Burner, and now whenever it is plugged into a machine, the machine will not turn on.

Obviously we have tried it in several machines each with the same result. I am hopeful that he's damaged the motherboard on the HDD and the rest is OK.

Does anyone know of anywhere that can offer repairs (at non-rediculous rates) on hard-drives ?

It would be really good if he could keep his data coz it's taken him quite some time to get such a great collection of goat pr0n.

the motherboard on the hdd?

There are places you can get the data extracted off hdd's that no longer work but it's very very expensive. If the computer booted and detected the drive there is software you can get yourself to extract the data.

So when you plug this drive in does the computer just not turn on at all or does it turn on and not detect the hdd? tried cable select? seems strange that the computer would not turn on at all if you just plugged in a hdd, that would suggest a power issue.

last edited by Nailbomb at 13:56:05 30/Aug/04

Does not turn on at all. Have tried changing the jumper for the various master/slave combos and it is the only thing plugged in.

I'm 99% sure it's a short-circuit or something on the HDD motherboard causing the PC to not power on.

I have heard of people actually physically swapping the boards between drives and getting them to work that way, but i don't have a spare hard-drive nor the wish to cause more problems by trying this myself.

If you can get an identical HDD to the faulty one you could sawp the PCB's and see if that works. Could be expensive, esp if it doesn't work.

I reckon just bin the drive, buy a new one and back up your s*** regularily, it isn't hard. A blank DVD disk is cheap as, no excuse really. Even HDD's are cheap as, just buy 2 drives and mirror them or something.

Yeah the PCB idea is good, I'm just not willing to do it myself, especially since it's not my drive.

Of course it should be backed up etc etc, but it's not, and the person whose drive it is wants to explore every possibily before consigning it to the tip.

I read something somewhere on the net (must be true :p) about a guy getting a board off one hard drive & sticking it on another & successfully getting his stuff off it. You'd have to find the same model number, possibly same manufacturerd date and location.

yeah swapping pcb with seagates doesnt work. it will burn teh regulators on the pcb out

how the hell? surely if you got the same model it'd work? I mean, you can't tell me that every single drive is made individually with different PCB layouts.

there are a lot of different revisions of drives. I did this the other day with a western digital drive and there are like 5 revisions of the 80GB drives and yes on each of them the PCB's are all different.

i have tried it before with seagate and it was from same batch and factory of make and mine died.

i have done it successfully with wd and maxtor drives though, plenty of times