Hey Recently my Seagate Barracuda (160GB - ST3160023A) died rather spectacularly - I smelt burning so powered down the box, and opened the side. Everthing seemed in order, so I powered up and sparks shot out from the PCB on the underside of the drive... unbelievable I know. The power supply has been tested and is fine. The drive is under warranty, but there's some data I want back - so I've bought another identical drive, and I'm going to attempt to swap the PCB's. Has anyone done this before? Any success / failures? Any advice would be much appreciated. Cheers!
I'm not sure of the specifics (I've never done it), but it can be done Give it a go, and try to keep the connections clean, some of them connect through pressure alone and need a good ammount of force to work. You'll see what I mean if you remove the PCB (assuming it's the same as my seagate 120Gb - similar model number). Good luck, I hope you manage to get your data back
Naah no success. Managed to swap the PCB's: it was relatively easy, but the drive wouldn't be detected in BIOS. Got a few sounds out of it, like the soft clicking sound of a right/read, but apart from that nothing. I can't really think what else I can realistically do. The serial numbers of drives and firmware were identical. Maybe there's more involved in the way of PCB + Drive specific calibration that happens during manufacturing? Btw the new PCB has gone back onto new drive, and is working correctly. Anyone got any other suggestions?
I've already been in contact with them, and they do offer data recovery services but I think we're talking uber-money, + p&p the the states. Cheers tho dude.
Unfortunately, swapping controller boards is less likely to work now. Newer drives store information specific to themselves on the boards, such as defect tables and calibration info. With such precision on all modern drives, a single master setting list cannot be stored on each drive identically - it has to be calibrated to the paticular positioning of its HDA, which is unfortunate if you want to recover data.
