Hi fellow TS'ers,

Since I joined I've had so much help from other members time and time again I felt it was only right to give something back to the forum. Hopefully this will be helpful to others who find themselves in the same (unfortunate) predicament...

Earlier this year, through carelessness and rough handling I caused the demise of my enclosure and damaged the PCB on my Maxtor 120GB drive
The drive contained over 70 films - many of which were irreplaceable, there was no way I was prepared to spend thousands of £'s paying a data recovery firm to retrieve the data for me so I went out and bought an identical model of my Maxtor HDD.

All I had to do was swap over the PCB's (the replacement had a more recent firmware revision but it made no difference) and I was back in business! My drive is now well protected inside a Weibetech Toughtech 400 USB enclosure where even my "destructive lifestyle" cannot harm it and all the films have been been backed up onto a Samsung 250GB and stored safely away...

If I'd been smarter from the start and performed regular backups I wouldn't have ended up in that situation, but you live and learn... Anyway, despite the scare tactics and propaganda of data recovery firms, a simple pcb swap worked for me and hopefully it should for you. (though I wonder if it was a "maxtor thing")

Jay

I can attest to this. Sometimes drives can be fixed by replacing the PCB and it is very easy to do.

Good info.