the ultimate fireball by quantum

irishguy

i was fitting a new harddrive for a friend and when i booted up his computer the old drive[a 15 gig quantum fireball] caught on fire, well one of the chips on the back did.has this happened to anyone else??? is there anywhay to fix this btw its out of warrenty.i know there is not much point in fixing this old drive but i want to have a go if i can

mayhem#

A mate of mine had exactly the same thing happen only a week or so ago.
It wasn't in a Dell machine by any chance?

irishguy

no it was a crappy compustore one about a year old and the quantum warrenty is allready gone off it

tman

didnt know compustore made computers, thought they just sold other companies pc's

irishguy

they dont sorry its a packard bell comp baught in compustore

spongebob

I had a fried circuit board on a HD once and got 3 of the same model off a repair shop (scsi apple mac drives from quantum all)

after some trial and error I got a circuit board off one of the banjaxed HD's from the repair shop, stuck it on the HD I wanted and hup she went and stayed for many moons after.

M

Inspector Gadget

...I've seen loads of 'em (both IDE and SCSI) spew forth the blue smoke of death and die - there are actually two Quantu Fireball 10lct's (10GB IDE drives) in my desk ATM (not mine, thankfully)both with fried servo controllers (one Philips - a TDA5274 or something like that, the other one's Panasonic). It seems to be alarmingly common, and alarmingly difficult to fix, IIRC...

Gateway and Dell sold an enormous volume of these drives and the failure rate was very high in the controller boards, alarmingly, but they never got the same coverage as, say, the IBM 75GXPs , probably because the board could be replaced.

(I found a place in Romania on google that repairs these drives a while back... lost the link though... you might like to do a google yourself or look into data recovery if the stuff is important to you/your mate?)

Gadget
[EDIT]P.S.> The Philips chip mentioned above is obsolete... chances are the fried chip on your board is too, unfortunately, as it's been a while since 15GB drives were "mainstream"...[/EDIT]

Gerry

Any ideas on why these chips were dying? Perhaps overheating?

Inspector Gadget

Originally posted by Gerry
Any ideas on why these chips were dying? Perhaps overheating?

That's a good question - the fried Philips chip I mentioned earlier has a scorch mark that seems to run from a pair of pins on one side into the middle - the plastic appears to have burned as well as melted so it got a lot of current, by the looks of things. [EDIT]The Panasonic chip on the other board has a virtually identical scorch, and it appears that the PCB under the chip is untouched, so it may be a power surge of some kind[/EDIT] I'll haul out a webcam in a mo (once the software's downloaded) and you can have a look for yourself.

Gadget

byte

My PC (Gateway) has a Quantum HDD and has always made a racket since Day1. Though I now only use it as Slave as my Master is a WesternDigital HDD which is quiet in comparison. I suppose I can expect my Quantum to die with similar fate as long as it don't burn my whole PC with it as it's on 24/7!

TinCool

I had a 20gig quantam blow up on me too a couple of months back. One of the chips on the underside literally exploded. Thing was I had it in one PC for over a year without any problems then I transferred it to another. Wasn't in it 5 minutes before that had happened.

Occidental

Had a user bring me in his home PC this morning as he's getting a lot of drive errors. And guess what, it's a Dell with a 15GB lct10, complete with small scorch mark on the Philips chip. The drive is still running at the moment and is bloody hot. Had a look at disk defrag and the drive map shows up like a big game of Minesweeper, bad sectors galore.

Informed by Maxtor that all lct10's had 1 year warranty and therefore not their problem.

Inspector Gadget

...picture attached to this post. Just call me "amnesia man"... :rolleyes:

(Look familiar, Occidental?)

Gadget

Occidental

Gadget,

I've a small scorch mark in the top left corner at the moment, but I've to pull some data off onto CD this afternoon, so it may look more like your pic by the end of the day. After that I might turn it into a set of coasters, as my Western Digital set are loosing their shine.

Gerry

Bloody hell, thats a pretty bad scorching gadget!
Perhaps these chips were never tested in a proper environment ( ie stuffed into a badly ventilated case ). The other thing which really doesn't help hard drive circuitry is that the heat will not even convect from it, due to the chip being upside down, and mounted against the drive itself. At least with a graphics card, the heat can make it through the pcb to the open air.

Inspector Gadget

...the underside of the board looks pretty much like it did when the drive left the factory - I'm not convinced it was heat... the two scorched pins on the chip are both tied to ground through the PCB, and considering the main ASIC (the Quantum IDE controller) has more contact with the biggest source of heat in the drive (namely the spindle motor) it looks suspiciously like a surge to me.

Gadget

spongebob

one is a Fireball CX 13.6 AT with a phillips chip that looks fine...I know it were media failure.

M

Quigs Snr

mayhem#,

Your friends name doesn't end with McMahon by any chance ?

mayhem#

Not unless he's changed it recently.....

Quigs Snr

Ok, a mate of mine from Clare's brothers, Dell machine had an actual fire in the hard drive a couple of weeks ago. Co-incidence all the same.

mayhem#

The number of people who have experienced this is surprisingly high....

BlueDrax

Guess what happened to my boss' PC this morning?

Yep! His Quantum Fireball CX 13.6 AT ( in a Gateway PC ) went the way of the Dodo with a puff of smoke.
Phillips chip, scorch marks, etc. Makes me wish I read this post last week.

Tried replacing the circuit board with one from an identical HDD ( Media failure ) but no joy. Green light flashes on the circuit board but the HDD doesn't spin up.

Can the data be recovered from this disk or is it gone for good?

Thanks.

Patrick.

spongebob

try it from a perfectly functioning drive. I would have done the same as you with the dodgy media one meself.

ye may have one that works perfectly. Its the only way to get the data off the failed one.

M

Inspector Gadget

...for [expletive]'s sake back up the "good" drive first!!!

Gadget

spooky donkey

well a mate of mine from galway baught one from gateway with a 10 gig drive and the same problem.

Any one got a number for gateway tech support?
well their new crowd who are doing it for them now anyway!

bkehoe

Got a pc in a few days ago with a broken hdd (no visable signs of damage but the pc doesnt see it and it clicks like mad when powered up)..a 6.4GB quantum.