www.deadharddrive.com

[Suede1]

To all;

I posted here just yesterday hoping to find a replacement logic board for my Seagate ST3300831A IDE/PATA Hard Drive. Well, in the meantime I tried a salvage method that I came across while looking through endless boards about hard drive failures and recovery techniques. My problem was that my voltage diodes were burnt and no power was getting to the hard drive, no spinning no noise no nothing.

I read that simply removing the burnt diode would allow power to run through the circuitry as long and the board was not damaged in other areas. I cut the fried diode from the logic board, switched the hard drive setting from cable select to slave (it was not a OS hard drive) connected the IDE cable and power, booted up the PC said a quick prayer and waited for Windows to recognise the drive which it did without a problem. The drive is still working as normal 6 hours later. My data was recovered fully...unbelievable. I never enjoyed a cold beer so much in my life after getting that drive working.

I've spent the past 3 weeks trying to find a replacement logic board to no avail trying to match firmware versions (frustrating as hell), now I can stop the painful search and it's all due to a simple removal of a burnt diode.

So, if anyone has a burnt voltage diode that is causing them hard drive power problems, my advice is just remove it completley from the logic board, make sure the drive settings are on slave unless it is an OS drive, boot up and shout for joy.

For those who think this might be their problem, a burnt voltage diode will smell like a burnt cookie out of the oven, there are two of them up close to where the power cable is, one is fractionally smaller than the other, I think they allow 5v & 12v input/output or something), they are covered by a black insulation which would most likely be cracked or broken off if you have this problem

I hope this helps somebody out.

Cheers!
Matt

[satch111]

Hi

Just wondering what the firmware of your drive is, as I have a fried board with firmware 3.02, the diodes look ok so not sure if it is worth trying to take them off!?

Thanks

Jason

[Suede1]

Hi Jason,

My Seagate 300gb Hard Drive uses Firmware 4.40, which means the logic board will not be able to communicate with your hard drive. Finding an exact match for your fried logic board is a tough job. I'd recommend removing the diodes anyway, one or both may be fried beneath the insulation while the insulation may look fine. It is worth a try, you have nothing to lose.


Rgds,
Matt