A while back I posted on here looking for advice on my failed hard drive. We had a brown out during a bad storm, and my drive got fried. I researched the option of swapping the drive's controller board, and a friend of mine who works in computers (networking, etc) was helping me out. He took the board from a SIMILAR but not the same model drive, and couldn't get it to work. So, on the last hope, I bought a used drive of the same model, swapped the board on that one, and EURIKA! Success!!! We ran a full scan of the drive, and everything was absolutely fine! I have all my data, addresses, emails, important work documents, etc back, safe and sound. Just thought I'd pass this on to anyone who may have a similar problem, and to say thanks to all who responded with advice to my post!

Well done, I am very impressed.

Well, you'll all be happy to hear that we went out and bought some better surge protection, and we are also now backing up our computers over our network as well as on disk. (I had a back up disk, but it wouldn't work for some reason. And it wasn't quite as recent as it needed to be - shame on me!

I hope you arent using that used HD you bought still.

No no... We just used the board off of it to replace the old board and retrieve the data.

I am using RAID 1 Mirror of 2 x 160 GB SATA for my really important stuff now. Its working out well. I've got cron jobs on the linux server writing their important stuff into their via samba, as well as everything else important from windows in there.

I hope that last post helps someone for back ups.... for me, you might as well have been speaking another language. But I will pass that on to those in the know... perhaps they will know what you mean!

Help!

Can you tell me the particulars of the hard drive failure you had that made you think you could just swap out the controller of another identical drive?

My hard drive just went south: S.M.A.R.T. error code 0x72 (Defective Drive - Replace). I'd like to to take your advice but how do I know this will work for me?

How did you swap out the controller? Step by Step Directions - Por Favor? Thanks in advance...

Wish I had tried that.

A couple of months ago, I begged and pleaded with Maxtor Support to do this with my dead 20GB drive. They wouldn't even consider it. And I didn't even consider it with the replacement drive Maxtor sent me. I'll know how next time:

1) order a replacement drive;
2) swap out the board;
3) recover data from the old drive;
4) put the good board back on the replacement drive;
5) put the dead board back on the drive being returned.

Now, why didn't I think of that?