Dropped my External hard drive!

stevek93

Hi all,
Dropped my external hard drive earlier now its not powering on. Tried opening it only to find that there is no SATA and only some weird connection soldered to the pcb that the USB connects to. My understanding is the hard drive itself is OK it only dropped to about 1foot from the floor.

Really not to sure what to do. Dont really care about the drive itself just that it holds all my college work for the past year that I need.

Edit: Removed the pcb there hoping a reseat would the job but still no luck. When I connect it to the USB it should still power on correct? Would it be possible to replace the board from a samsung drive or are they all different?

Merl1n

if you can get the same drive with the same firmware you could swap over the boards

T-Bird

Yeah, problem with PCB boards is that the board and its firmware constantly changes. Did a search for your PCB but there seems to be a few types.

Toshiba mdk339v-0w. This might be worth a try HERE if firmware etc is same.

BTW, I had same kind of problem before, so not keep all my work on skydrive. The new app allows me to synch between my laptop and PC

stevek93

Merl1n wrote: »

if you can get the same drive with the same firmware you could swap over the boards

Would it work if the firmware was different even though the drives were the same or possibly re-flash the firmware?

stevek93

T-Bird wrote: »

Yeah, problem with PCB boards is that the board and its firmware constantly changes. Did a search for your PCB but there seems to be a few types.

Toshiba mdk339v-0w. This might be worth a try HERE if firmware etc is same.

BTW, I had same kind of problem before, so not keep all my work on skydrive. The new app allows me to synch between my laptop and PC

Was looking at that my understanding that it has SATA instead of the soldered USB header so 99% chance different firmware.

Skydrive Is great tool, should try looking at CarotDAV great for browsing from USB.

ZENER

Was the drive powered up when you dropped it ?

Ken

If you dropped an external drive you are much more likely to have damaged the HDD itself rather than the PCB.

ZENER

Deleted User wrote: »

If you dropped an external drive you are much more likely to have damaged the HDD itself rather than the PCB.

If the drive was powered down then the heads will have been safely parked so hopefully no head to platter damage will have been caused. If the drive was powered up however - well that's another story !!

Ken

stevek93

No hard drive wasn't powered on thank god. Not to sure how a small drop could damage the PCB though?

ZENER

ZENER wrote: »

If the drive was powered down then the heads will have been safely parked so hopefully no head to platter damage will have been caused. If the drive was powered up however - well that's another story !!

Ken

The OP posted here because it's not working so we're already past the point of 'hopefully' not being damaged.

Safely parked or not, the components inside the HDD are thousands of times more fragile than the PCB outside. If you drop it and it stops working, 99% of the time it is the HDD itself that's gone.

ZENER

OP with just the board connected do you get any indication in Device Manager of a USB device being connected. Have device manager open, plug the board in and see if there's any activity on the Device Manager USB section.

If the enclosure landed on the connector end it may be the connector that took the brunt of it - assuming the connector was plugged in at the time it fell.

Ken

stevek93

ZENER wrote: »

OP with just the board connected do you get any indication in Device Manager of a USB device being connected. Have device manager open, plug the board in and see if there's any activity on the Device Manager USB section.

If the enclosure landed on the connector end it may be the connector that took the brunt of it - assuming the connector was plugged in at the time it fell.

Ken

Nothing from device manager or the BIOS and no cables were connected when it dropped. The pcb board is pretty much dead not getting any power at all again very strange that a small drop would damage the pcb.

stevek93

Just thinking can anyone make out a fault from that picture maybe I could try fix it myself.