www.deadharddrive.com

[Jimmy]

My drive recently died and refused to show any sign of life, won't get detected by the BIOS and such. A short while before it died, BIOS used to pause after displaing "Detecing IDE Drives...", the drive would power up a little late and then everything would be under way. Unfortunitley this didn't strike me as odd and one day it simply didn't turn on. Now before it died, it didn't make any kind of strange noise or work slowly or anything like that. What are the chances it's a dead logic board and not an internal component? the drive is a 40gig Maxtor and about 5 years old.

[Subzuki]

-Is (was) the drive 7200RPM? If so, it could have overheated and the disk surface degraded from excess heat. I have seen many hard drives with the surface of the platter a beautiful hue of blue from excess heat. Almost like the blue you see on headers on cars or bikes. Platters from the factory are usually a copper color in older drives, and silver color in newer drives. This may not be the problem however.
-When the drive did work, did it ever show up in the bios with a different name than what it usually showed? I think it is NP40F or something similar. It might also show up as something else. If this is the case, I know of no method other than specialized labs. To detailed to explain here. Check out some other posts. I posted some links elsewhere on this site to some sites which deal with this.
-Another thing to check for was mentioned by someone in another post.
Apparently, he found a bad trace on the back of his board. (A trace is the lines you see on the controller board that connects all the components) He put some solder on it and got it going again. If you are trying to see the traces better, it may be helpful to use a magnifying glass.
-Sometimes it is a chip that has fried and you can see a definite burn mark on it. I have saved a few drives with a board swap when this happened.
-Depending on if you are trying to save priceless data, or just trying to save the drive, then it is your call on how far to go.
Subzuki

[Guest]

your problem is very unlikely a internal component damaged
its more likely the logic board is at fault or blown something

[mascal4]

Looks like you have a logic boar issue there, mate. As it is an old hdd, it might not be so easy to find a replacement. Try www.eBay.co.uk