On Fri, 14 May 2010 16:20:36 -0700, David Farber wrote:

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.

LOL Yes your description was very verbose. I'm glad you got a resolution
using the method described. However, I {think} drives have writable flash
memory that is used by the manufacturer to map things like engineering
tracks and the likes so the possibility may exist that you would end up
with slightly less capacity or some other anomaly by the swap. Of course
this is pure speculation on my part but it is born of reading something
in the past and may not apply to new(er) drives. I have done exactly the
same thing with and old Conner RLL drive many moons ago and it did work.
Back then before IDE appeared on the consumer shelf drives were horribly
expensive and anything one could do to salvage a drive was well worth the
effort.I can remember waiting hours, even days for Gibson Spinrite to try
to move data from damaged to good clusters and map those clusters out as
bad only to find out it stayed at 30% done for 30 hours