Broken External Hard-Drive Smells Like Burning!

themarcus

Hey,

I have a WD Mybook 250Gb Essential Edition that I bought about 8 months ago. I'm in Germany studying at the moment and forgot the power cable. So I rather foolishly tried my laptops cable in the hard-drive:
1 - The light on the drive turned on for a second.
2 - There was a sound (kinda like when you tap a pen on a table once)
3 - The light went out.
4 - I tried to turn it on again and nothing happened.
5 - It smells like burning now! A friend over here has a WD Mybook too and his smells normal

So, I presume I've burned a fuse out, right? My data is safe, right? Please!!
Anyway, anyone know where I can get this looked after while I'm back in Dublin over Xmas? Reckon the warranty will cover it if I just play dumb?

Thanks,
Marcus

Alun

Another user here (slickmcvic) had exactly the same problem recently with a Maxtor external disk. That was a laptop adapter too, 18V IIRC as opposed to 12V for the correct adapter. He brought it round to me and I took the disk out of the chassis and attached it to a USB-IDE adapter I have, and the only thing that happened was the unmistakeable aroma of fried electronics emanating from the area around the power connector. The drive didn't spin up or anything.

I'd also assumed that there would be some kind of protection in the external chassis to prevent over-voltages being passed directly onto the disk electronics itself, but obviously not

Your only real hope is to find an identical disk somewhere, and swap the electronics over, although for various reasons, that doesn't always work either. Drive recovery people will probably be able to do that too, but will charge you a fair bit for the privilege.

jor el

themarcus wrote:

So, I presume I've burned a fuse out, right? My data is safe, right? Please!!

Wishful thinking or simple naivety? Fuses don't normally have a smell when they blow, fried hard disk electronics do though Professional recovery will be very expensive (possibly thousands of euro) and replacing the electronics yourself is hit and miss.

Your best bet to check the disk itself is to take it out of the case and try it internally in a computer, or put it in another case. If it works it works, if not then it's pretty much gone.

Anyway, anyone know where I can get this looked after while I'm back in Dublin over Xmas? Reckon the warranty will cover it if I just play dumb?

If you try to get it fixed or recover the data under warranty then they'll figure out pretty quickly what you did and won't cover you for it. Depending on where you bought it, the shop may offer a simple refund/replacement if you claim it just stopped working, but that won't help getting your data back. You'll invalidate the warranty by opening the drive case too, so make your decision carefully.

Alun

jor el wrote:

Professional recovery will be very expensive (possibly thousands of euro) and replacing the electronics yourself is hit and miss.

The place slickmcvic took his drive to in Dublin were asking €600.

Replacing the electronics is hit and miss as you say .. a lot of drives have calibration data burnt into onboard rom during manufacturing to compensate for manufacturing tolerances. These clearly won't be the same for every drive, but it's possibly worth the effort if you can get hold of an identical drive cheaply enough. Different firmware versions can cause problems too. Anyway, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and it's a lot cheaper than €600 if it works.

TempestSabre

Tough break on the drive. Try all of the above and maybe you'll get lucky. I swapped electronics on a drive once and it worked. But I'd bought two identical drives (for experimenting with RAID) so I had its twin handy.

The lesson here is that if the data is important you should have it backed up in more than one location. Short term to HD, long term to CD or DVD etc.

el Bastardo

What I've found out is that simply swapping the electronics doesn't work at all for WD drives because each drive has some sort of unique firmware/code. There seems to be only one reliable way of fixing damaged electronics on WD drives which is with a 'hot swap' (i.e. suspending the drive heads on both drives and swapping around the electrionics with the power connected and turned on).

I've read alot about WD drive recovery over the past few months (turns out I had a corrupted firmware module, couldn't find a firmware flasher for WD drives, so I ended up binning it).

themarcus

Thanks, guys - damn it sucks though!
I have the data backed up anyway, it was only the drive I wanted to salvage. Ah well, off to buy another
Thanks again!