Meat Plow wrote:
On Thu, 13 May 2010 11:40:28 -0700, David Farber wrote:

I use my generic, home made, pc to test and analyze client's hard
drives. The motherboard in my pc is an ECS NFORCE3. It's never given
me any problems. When I hooked up the test drive in question (lots of
knocking noises) on the second IDE channel, the pc booted, the pc
speaker beeped once (normal for this pc), but it just froze after
that. I rebooted and tried to go into the setup menu but that didn't
work either. I gave up on the test and removed the drive I was
checking. But now, the same problem occurs. The pc powers up,
speaker beeps, and it freezes there. If I press "delete" to enter
setup, it just hangs without going into setup. If I remember
correctly, immediately after removing the test drive, I was able to
get to the bios menu but it said no drive was installed. I used the
internal clear CMOS jumper to reset the bios but the outcome was the
same. Now, I am not even able to get that far. If I put in any other
drive, I am able to access the bios menu and the drive is recognized
correctly. I was not having any problems with the drive before
adding the test drive on the secondary IDE channel. I can feel the
motor humming when the machine is powered up. I've tried switching
between "cable select" and "master=on, slave =off," that didn't
help. There are no clicking or foreign noises. I was hoping to
purchase a used drive of the same model and swap out the controller
boards. My question is, how close of a match do these boards have to
be? So far I have found the same drive model number and firmware
code, but a different HDA p/n. Anyone have any luck doing a swap
like this? Is there some identifying data on the hard drive platters
themselves that would cause the drive to "disappear" like this? I
did try the drive in another pc. It gave a similar error, "Drive not
detected," and asked if I wanted to bypass the detection process.

Thanks for your reply.

WHEW what a read. Put a known good drive on the dead drive cable. If
CMOS enumerates it then the drive electronics are hosed and you can
either toss it, try to find an exact working drive and swap the
control board or send it off to a recovery service if it has data on
it you can't do without.

Do you mean what a good read or what a bad read? Do I have a career in store
as a technical writer? lol. Anyway, you were right about the electronics.
See my post from yesterday. A few of the smd parts on the pc board got
knocked off from sliding test drives into the tight fitting drive bay
underneath it. I happened to have had another Seagate drive to use for
parts and now all is well.

Thanks for your reply.
--
David Farber
David Farber's Service Center
L.A., CA