TL's elektronik ting og sager
WD3200 hard disc recovery & repair after lightning damage
Back in 2007, I (also) had a file server for all my electronics projects, private photos, movies, etc. It was a completely ordinary PC I was using at the time. Today I use a NAS instead. The PC was hidden above the ceiling so it was in the cavity that was up to the floor upstairs. I did it in this way because I had had a burglary once and it was all stolen. I did not want to do that again. It worked really well until the lightning struck and destroyed it completely. It was so bad that there had been a fire in the PCB's on both hard disks. Not good!
Sadently I had not backed up all the data and I would very much like to have it all again. I was lucky and found a hard disk similar to those that had broken. The plan was to move the PCB from the new hard disk onto the other two, one at a time, and then copy the data onto a new one.
Unfortunately, they did not work when I moved the new PCB over. I thought it must be because the eeprom that was on the old hard drives probably contained the TOC file (Table Of Contens), and that was a problem because they were probably also broken.
I had nothing to lose so I tried to move this eeprom from the old disk PCB onto the new PCB and YES! It worked again! All the mechanical parts in the old hard drives worked perfectly and I was able to recover all the data from both disks. I was happy again :)
Here you can clearly see that there has been a fire in this IC. I'm guessing it was the motor driver. You can see the eeprom here. It's the little eight legged one next to the motor driver.
Both disks. See how the IC's have burned into the foam rubber between the PCB and the hard disk.
Some more pictures....
