I’ve acquired many internal drives and two 3.5" enclosures. Since I recently lost my motherboard to a bad run-in with static and 2-conductor Romex, I put two of them into the enclosures and converted them to external drives for a laptop.
Problem is that the power bricks that go with the two different enclosures look identical, outputting in a 6-pin adaptor that looks like a S-video or a PS/2 port. Unfortunately, it appears that the pins differ in that they have reversed the power flux coupling. Or something – from the pinout it looks like the ground and the +5V pins are switched. I plugged the wrong power adaptor into one of the enclosures and now it appears to have fried the hyperdrive it contained.
Lest I dodge the claim of idiocy, I’ve actually done this once before. So now I have two drives that are dead to the world. I suspect that I’ve just blown a diode or at most the power supply, as the drive is still recognized by Windows as a drive, it just doesn’t make a peep and won’t mount/read from it. I don’t need these drives, although the total of around 200 GB of space would be nice to have. Does anyone know a cheap way to diagnose or fix the problem? To be worth my while, it would have to be under about $20, because you can now buy new 200 GB drives for around $60.
This is possible but not recommended is to get a set of used working drives with identical model and series numbers and transplant the electronics. You’d need a dust free environment (there are many sets of instructions on the net on how to make a makeshift cleanroom, I don’t know if any of them work), and probably a set of torx screwdrivers but look on the drives to see how the electronics are attached. Now be very very careful and it just might work.
That’s a lot of effort just to get a functioning empty drive. By your description and lack of panic, I’m assuming htere’s no data marooned on these drives.
It’s wierd that the controller is alive enough to talk to the computer and get a drive letter assigned, but the drive won’t spin up.
As cheap as they’ve gotten, I’d just get a new external enclosure. Put the drive into it, and if all’s well, wonderful. If not, then the drive croaked.
I know it’s the drive because the enclosure works with the multitude of other drives I have sitting around here. Provided you use the right power cable. And the drive doesn’t work in other enclosures.
It is recognized by the computer in the sense that the USB bus knows that there is a mass storage device attached. Not well enough to know that it is a hard drive or what kind of drive or anything else.
I’ll probably end up tossing the drive, but this could be one of those things where I’ve just blown a cap or a diode on the power plug of the drive and I just have to replace those for a few pennies. I’m not into professional data recovery, converting rooms into clean rooms, or anything of the sort. Good idea, though, groman.
“It is recognized by the computer in the sense that the USB bus knows that there is a mass storage device attached. Not well enough to know that it is a hard drive or what kind of drive or anything else.”
My guess is its getting that info from the enclosure and the actual drive is cactus.
USB provides 5V, but only 100mA. This is plenty to run the enclosure electronics, but nowhere near enough to spin the drive up, hence the external power supply. If either the power supply has failed, (or possibly select components on the enclosure), then it’s likely that a connected PC would detect that a device was present, but be unable to use it.
Similarly, if the drive fails to function, then the enclosure electronics will be detected, but the drive will not be.
(Preview shows the latter is the problem)
What you might be able to do is what I think groman is describing, but isn’t as complex as all that. If your HD dies of an electronic, (not physical head crash/scraping platters/etc etc), then should you have another drive of the same model and type, you may recussitate the drive by removing the board (no clean-room needed, it’ll be connected with a sealed array of pins or metal tabs), and slapping the working one on. (This is actually what we just did last week after the incident with a co-worker’s machine, but the model match wasn’t exact, and the resulting drive doesn’t function.) If you were wondering why someone would want to buy a dead HD from EBay, this is why.
This is mostly a last-resort, data-recovery thing, and you don’t seem to have any spare drives, so I’d forget it. There’s no way you’re going to diagnose/repair the surface-mount electronics. I’d just cry and get a label-maker so all your transformers are labeled and this never happens to you again.
