www.deadharddrive.com

[doug2060]

Hello, I have a hard drive that the power supply was connected to upside down. This has caused severe damage to the logic board. Can the board be replaced or is it a total loss. I really appreciate any help on this subject before I attempt to buy a costly board.

Drive specs:
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9
200GB ATA/133 HDD
YAR41BWO
6Y200P0062811

[unitron]

I'm assuming that by upside down you mean that the red wire went where the yellow wire was supposed to go and the yellow went where the red was supposed to go and the 2 black wires in the middle got swapped.

The black wires are both ground wires and are connected together both at the power supply and at the drive so swapping them makes no difference electrically.

The good news may be that the motor, which is supposed to get 12 Volts (yellow wire), only got 5 Volts, so it shouldn't have been harmed.

The bad news could well be that the little integrated circuit chips on the controller board (sometimes informally referred to as the "paddle board") got 12 Volts when they're only supposed to get 5 Volts (the red wire).

Voltage is what pushes current whenever there's a conductive path between positive and negative. The higher the voltage the higher the current, assuming that the resistance of the conductive path (in this case the drive's electronics) remains the same.

You've probably toasted enough stuff on the controller board to make it cheaper to put a new one on than for somebody to try to troubleshoot it and figure out which chips survived and which didn't.

The area of uncertainty is whether the "voice coil" that positions the head assembly got too much voltage (which it *might* have survived) and whether the heads themselves got too much voltage (which they may or may not have survived). Try emailing Maxtor customer support with an email address they can't trace back to you and ask them.

The reason I say use an untraceable email is that if the drive is still under warranty you could always try to get them to fix it without mentioning anything to them about the reversed power. (Those plugs and sockets are keyed to prevent that, you know) They just got bought up by Seagate so things may be hectic enough around there that they'd rather just fix it than fight with you about it.

I've got a 20 Gig Maxtor that went bad on me within the warranty period but I couldn't get things organized in time to file a claim before the warranty period expired, so they owe the universe a free warranty fix anyway.

Just be sure to let them know not to destroy any of your data while doing the repair. (They can always copy it off to another drive and then back on after the repair)

Good luck.