fried my hard drives, bought same hard drive, tried chip board on old hard drive, but no luck

multi-tasking_guy

Limp Gawd
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Jun 16, 2017
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Here's what happened, I fried my hard drives, which were about 6 months old.
I used a cable from another psu and it fried my hard drives.

I didn't know i'm not supposed to use cables from other psu's

Well it's too late and my hard drive fried and they smell like smoke. And they don't spin.

So i had no choice to go out and buy a couple new hard drives. I bought the exact same ones i bought 6 months ago.

I wanted to do a test and i took off the chip board from the new hard drive and put it on the old drive.

And it starting spinning! I tried reformatting it but it always gave me a:

initialize disk request cannot be performed because of an I/O device


I tried to reformat it on Linux as well but no luck, So i can see the drive but i can't reformat it.

I thought it was a good test to try. Even if it worked i still wouldn't be able to save them since i can only use one board. Luckily i had an off-line backup.


But my question is why won't it work? When i fried it, it fried the chip board. Since it's mechanical inside i don't think it would matter.

im guessing maybe the firmware is newer?


the chip board looks like this on both,
Seagate-1TB-Desktop-HDD-Internal-Hard-Disk-Drive-7200-RPM-SATA-6Gb-s-64MB-Cache-3.jpg



advice?
 
Linus just did a video about this. Give it a look
yeah linus JUST did a video about this. You need the same board revision number, but there is also an 8 pin chip on the board that would need to be transferred over from the old, broken board, to the new replacement, which contains specific information pertaining to the calibration of that particular drive.
 
I don't understand. Why would you want to resurrect the old drives since you already bought exact new ones? One would do this for the sake of the data, but I see that you have been trying to format the thing multiple times, which gives an indication that you really don't care about the data. Or are you still hopping to recover some data after formatting using either windows or linux?
 
I don't understand. Why would you want to resurrect the old drives since you already bought exact new ones? One would do this for the sake of the data, but I see that you have been trying to format the thing multiple times, which gives an indication that you really don't care about the data. Or are you still hopping to recover some data after formatting using either windows or linux?
He bought new drives and thought he may be able to use them to work out what went wrong on his old one.
For the fun of it.
He would like to understand more about why it didnt work.
 
Mostly I think the protection circuit would short and you can remove the 2 chips for the 2 volatges 5V and 12V and get them working again. These would be the 2 large chips close to the power connector. Just clip the leads so they dont short out the power supply. You can check it with a meter to see if the cips are shorting or not as well. But this is the first thing that goes with any power spike and is very common. You can also use the meter and trace the power line to the chips. They just short out the 5V and 12V to ground when activated.

We were talking about this on the seagate forum and they did not like it and banned the subject.

To swap circuit boards you have to flash the drive geometry to the new board and there are companies they do this specifically as its soldered onto the board. They remove it from the old board and solder it to the new one. The defects are mapped and flashed onto the chip at the factory. I think they also have formatting info on them as well since with new drives we have no such option about low level formatting the drives and is done only once at the factory. Due to defects this formatting changes drastically from drive to drive with all the reallocatiosn and such..
 
WTF?
I've ran dual PSUs and mixed and matched HDD power, board power, even cross-powered a GPU from both PSUs without issue. No different to when companies sell dedicated 12V PSUs.
Is your set up grounded properly? I'd be looking into that first before doing anything further.

And yes as someone has mentioned maybe something killed the coil inside or something in the power section. Some HDDs have additional circuitry inside so could also be that too.
 
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You can fry your equipment if you use a cable from a modular power supply that has the same connectors but different assignment of the pins on the power supply side.
 
WTF?
I've ran dual PSUs and mixed and matched HDD power, board power, even cross-powered a GPU from both PSUs without issue. No different to when companies sell dedicated 12V PSUs.
Is your set up grounded properly? I'd be looking into that first before doing anything further.

And yes as someone has mentioned maybe something killed the coil inside or something in the power section. Some HDDs have additional circuitry inside so could also be that too.

I am using two power supplies right now lol.. I think maybe they plugged the drives in while the PSU was on? Otherwise, I can't see it frying anything unless those sata cables are screwed on the power supply.
 
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He used a PSU cable from another PSU which had its pins wired differently.
It killed his hard drives.
This one isnt tricky guys, he gave the clues in the first paragraph.

drescherjm got it too :)
 
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