www.deadharddrive.com

[Lord_MiL]

Hi all,

A few weeks ago my power supply melted down taking with it an old 160GB drive that, fortunately, I had already copied everything off of (drive started smoking before I could pull the plug from the wall.) My 640GB Seagate SATA drive seemed to come away unharmed. The PSU was under warranty so I RMA'd it and recently received the replacement part from the company and put my computer back together. Everything was running smooth for a couple days and then suddenly, this morning, my PC shut off and would not come back on unless I unplugged the HD. I also tried hooking the HD up to my SATA-USB converter and the power brick for that would also not power up with the drive attached. The saddest part is that after my PSU went, I decided I needed to get serious about backing up so I bought a 1TB external drive to do backups, but my wife's computer died earlier in the week (unrelated issue) so I've been focusing on that and hadn't gotten around to doing my backup yet!

Everything I've read online points to the TVS burning out, but looking at the PCB, I can't find any sign of damage (see pic below) I also don't currently have a DMM as I lent my good one out a while back and it didn't make it back to me alive

I'm wondering what you would suggest for my next steps. Would a cheapo $20 DMM from radio shack be good enough to check the TVS? Given that the drive worked for some time after the original PSU meltdown, is there some other component that could possibly be the culprit? Cash is tight right now (no surprise there) and I greatly appreciate any advice you have. I tried posting on another HDD board but all I got were replies about how by trying to fix this myself I was telling data recovery specialists to "F off" I assure you that's not my intention - this data is important to me, but I just don't have that kind of money, so it's not really an option.

Thanks.