mike wrote:

On May 20, 1:17 pm, "Michael A. Terrell"
wrote:
Shaun wrote:

It's a 40 Gb drive, very old technology. Just throw it out
and buy a new drive. You'll probably get a 500 Gb for $30
some dollars.

That kind of defeats the reason for having a REPAIR newsgroup.

Just a follow-up on the drive - whatever happened to it, neither the
electronics nor the recording-media part of it work any more. After
careful inspection, there are no problems with bent pins, or other
physical problems apparent. I suppose I might have an intermittent
IDE cable which only acted up maybe a couple of times during the
dozens of cyclings of various programs and test runs, but the cables
on there are the kink with an extra gizmo to pull the cable lose from
the plug without stressing the cable-to-plug connection. Anyway,
thanks to all for the suggestions, I was successful at least in
learning a bit more about how hard drives work.


You may have some cracked solder joints on the controller board on
the drive, or other problems. Some repairs are beyond the average tech,
because they don't have the right tools available. You need good
magnification and a steady hand to resolder some ultra fine pitch ICs,
and most people can't do it even with the right tools. I keep dead
drives on hand to swap boards and sometimes repair a controller board,
but I worked in electronics manufacturing where it was part of my job to
do that level of work. Just keep studying electronics and you may be
surprised at what you can learn.





--
It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.