Recovering the Dead Hard drive with PCB Solution
Kevin Shaw
CEO
PCB Solution
http://www.onepcbsolution.com
For those of us that have worked around computers long enough, we have more then likely experienced the dead hard drive. A bad defective hard drive can usually be indicated with clicking or a whirring sound which can actually be worse then a drive that has no power. A drive can go dead to a variety of reasons with the most likely due to a power surge to an enclosure of an external hard drive or short to the entire system. Dead drives that have surged can take out other components such as ports or even stop the computer from starting entirely. As a recommendation when a drive is dead, you generally do not want to hook it up to anything else. In some cases, when an external has taken a power surge and stopped working, is no longer identified from the machine, removal of the drive from the external housing is possible. In some cases, data may be retrieved as a secondary drive.
If you were to take the drive out, inspect it before hand and make sure there is no scorch marks on the PCB or expansion on the capacitors before even attempting to connect. If it was a Main Drive and it is stopping the system from even starting up again this can be due to the drive in electrical failure mode. There is a solution. At one point, many of us techs would purchase a similar drive with the same model number, storage and firmware code just to get at the data. Once the secondary drive was purchase it was thought to remove the PCB from the drive and transfer it to the affected drive, this was a nice solution that didn't always work - with the larger drive sizes today this method has become more costly and honestly, that means you may have a perfectly good drive laying around without a PCB on the drive and that bothers me!
PCB Solution is a company I found last year while looking for a hard drive to replace a 3TB that had gone bad due to a power surge. The process is simple and more cost efficient then trying to find a duplicate drive. With this process a visit to the Website or Ebay online store, find the drive you are looking for and after a payment of $49, you ship them the PCB that has been removed from the Hard Drive. The process is done in easy steps with the PCB Solutions team sending you e-mail on what you need to do. After you ship them the PCB Board, not the entire hard drive, they process your PCB, transfer the firmware from the old board to the replacement they will send you. Once you receive that PCB you can reattach it and you should have that drive spinning again. They will send instructions on the process along with the drive. The Customer Service is Top Notch and more then likely the reason they have a 100% rating on the PCB Solution Ebay Page.
Check out our Interview with Kevin Shaw of PCB Solution
The Video features Andy Taylor of TechtalkRadio changing out the PCB Board and testing a drive with the replacement from PCB Solution
For More Information
Visit the PCB Solution Webpage
http://www.onepcbsolution.com