www.deadharddrive.com

[Thoth]

I have a Fireball Plus AS that just died all of a sudden and made the clank clank sound, no longer recognized by the BIOS. I scoured the net for help and learned about just swapping the controller with another drive.

It just so happened that my slave drive was the same Fireball Plus AS 30GB. Trying to be careful I bought a new 80GB drive and backed up the working Fireball to the new drive. I then swapped the controller boards....

The drive now gets recognized by the BIOS for a few moments and then gives me a "Fixed drive error" and removes itself from the BIOS (for lack of better decription). There is no clunk clunk sound anymore but I still cannot get at my files. I've tried PowerMax to no avail because the drive is no longer recognized by the BIOS by the time PowerMax fires up.

I then tried the working drive with the "bad" controller and got the clunk clunk.

So, I assume it was the controller that fried, but am at a loss at this point. I cannot figure out what firmware each uses to see if that is the problem.

Anyone ???

[gordo]

have a 40gb maxtor fireball 3 in my tivo which i decided to upgrade after copying data.turns out tivo locks there maxtor drives which you have to use a program to unlock.if used wrong it permantly locks the board of the drive and makes it unseeable to bios which i did.i purchased a 40gb fireball 3 harddrive on ebay and swapped boards and now my drive works again.i didnt know the firmware number,so either i got lucky or you just need the correct size drive.