Ok. So ... i'll let these pics speak for itself. basically when i disconnected the hdd. i did a half-arsed job and didn't remove it entirely away from the molex connection. as a result, the first female socket in the molex of the psu touched the second male of the hdd and thus burns and smoke and blabla. scared the **** out of me. Anyways, what i was wondering is if it's possible to retrieve the data i had on the hdd. If i power it up with only 3 male pins on the hdd will it still work? i'm not game enough to try. if not, can a new molex pin be re-soldered onto the hdd board and will that work? or is the whole hdd stuffed..... thanks in advance.
wow... i have never seen that happen before, i dont know whether u can retreive data from it but my guess would be no, but i may be wrong take it to a computer shop or somthing see what they say.
it might be worth just trying it plugged into a spare psu, if it spins up then you sir are the luckyest man alive. Otherwise it *might* be possible to recover your data by taking an identical HD, and swapping the control boards over. Maybe. (the middle two pins on a molex are both GND so there's a good chance it'll work without one of them)
Did you try to remove the drive while it was still powered up? Maybe you didn't unplug the PSU or something? Wow. I'd be inclined to say that that drive is toast. You could try to solder on a pin or something. That line is neccessary as it is the ground for the 12v iirc. it won't have a ground without it I'm afraid. Otherwise there would be no point to having it and 12v and 5v would have a common ground, which won't work. If I was working in a shop and you brought that to me I would probably laugh and tell you to buy a new drive. Those data recovery services would probably work as they read the magnetic info on the platters directly. But they're far too expensive.
(You can run a harddrive with only one of the Gnd's connected, I've done it before (took me a while to notice that a molex splitter was broken), but obviously it's not a good idea.) It's probably worth just trying the HD on a spare psu (and nothing else you don't mind loosing) to see if it'll spin up, if it does chances are it's ok. About now you really ought to think about RAID or regular backups...
Your best bet would be to try a professional data recovery service - have a search around. It will not be cheap, but they have a very high success rate. Is there any physical damage to the circuit board other than those pins? It sounds more like you shorted a lot of current through ground rather than toasted the control board. It might be worth powering the drive up with a jump-wire connecting the ground from the PCB to the missing pin on the Molex connector. If the board is toast and you're interested in fixing it yourself (and what have you got to lose?), it might be worth buying an identical drive and swapping out the controller boards. Although modern drives store information like defect tables etc. on their board, you might be able to retrieve the information. It's unlikely that the platters or anything past the circuit board is seriously damaged, since things probably fused before it got to the ICs inside the disk. The above suggestions are entirely at your own risk, though - if the data is important, don't chance it. Get a quote from the professionals.
I have a freind who salavged a disk by exchanging the controler from one disk to the other (identical disks) so it can be done. If you don't have a identical disk and it doesn't run as is. I would very carefully sodder a new lead on the sodder point for the broken pin.
eek! thats not cool. You still might be able to recover that... i would try and reconnect the pin or resolder it on. kinda risky... like hitman said if the data is important check out the professional data recovery. We used one last year for a school server that took a dump when the power surged and they got all the data back. We had backups but they were getting older and the day prior to the next back up was when it surged.
check out spinrite at GRC for data recovery, im pretty sure thats a good one. ill give my dad a quick quiz later cos im certain he's done a fair bit of data recovery in his time.
wow, the hdd works. i plugged it into my other crap box of a computer and it spins and up and i installed windows on it just to check all was fine ... and it is! i'm reluctant to put it in the gaming rig though. no, i didn't unplug it with the power on. i turned the pc and psu off. unplugged the hdd. then turned the pc back on. that's when i noticed the pins were touching, as shown in the last picture. thanks for all the helps as well. appreciate it.
