hdd broken molex pins

O

orvil01

Gawd
Joined
Nov 2, 2003
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978
Well i guess i was being a little careless tonight and was trying to jam my drive cage into my case, and managed to break off all 4 molex power pins. Anyone ever had this happend?

its a western digital wd2500lb, id like to atleast get my data off of this drive if not continue to use it. Any suggestions?

the only thing i can think is since there are holes with the remains of the pins in them maybe soldering in a pigtail of some sort. Other option would be to replace the pcb with a buddy of mine who has the same harddrive that is kinda flaky (not detected by bios and runs only in pio mode under windows)

But im open to any suggestions?

Thanks
orvil01
 
If that is the case I would not swap the PCB. Hell I probably would not want to do that anyways, have you ever taken apart a Hard Drive?

My Fix would probably be to cut a spare molex extension or splitter type connector in 1/2 and solder the wires to the HD PCB in the appropriate places, then use the other end to plug into as usual. Not as pretty as stock but I see no reason why that would not be a decent long term solution, unless your using the drive as hot swappable or something. (make sure you solder the right end; the female end of the adapter ;) ).

Or if the data was super critical, then I would probably send it to a data recovery place, or a place that can replace the connector with a new one to make it just like before. (Well maybe, but I would probably just repair it with solder knowing myself and believing in my abilities). I would use Silver Solder, but I don't know much abotu specific types. Which lead me to some research where I found this thread before I went to bed.
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=131640

My Buddy seems to think lead free solder sucks, but I'm not so sure about that. Silver Solder is nice if you can afford it, just make sure you use the rosin core kind. It might also be helpful to pre-flux the areas.
 
hey thanks for the tips.

i was able to fix it.

It may not be proper i just used an extension cable and cut off the end and stuck the wires in the holes where the pins used to be and used a hot glue gun to hold it all together. works fine, not sure if im going to trust it for long term or not though.
 
orvil01 said:
hey thanks for the tips.

i was able to fix it.

It may not be proper i just used an extension cable and cut off the end and stuck the wires in the holes where the pins used to be and used a hot glue gun to hold it all together. works fine, not sure if im going to trust it for long term or not though.
Click to expand...


Yea I would solder for long term.
 
I can get you the part number of the exact connector off Digi-Key. Ill look at my catalog at work tommorow.
 
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