[vox-tech] blown power supply = fried MB and HDs

[Jonathan Stickel]

I went to turn on my 3 yr old custom built desktop on Friday, there was 
a load "crack" sound, and the computer would not boot.  After spinning 
the dvd drives, it would immediately reboot; no bios display or 
anything, even after clearing cmos and unplugging all the drives.  I 
eventually traced it to a blown capacitor in the power supply.  I went 
and bought a new power supply, installed it, and got the same behavior. 
  OK, the motherboard is fried; went back out and bought a whole new 
computer.  I installed my old hard drive to find that it is fried too! 
Now I am really unhappy: several years of photos, game data, personal 
files are all gone! :-(

In a confluence of bad timing, you may recall about a month ago that my 
hard drive was acting up (in hindsight, maybe related to a failing power 
supply).  So I installed the hard drive I had been using to for a 
backup.  I hadn't got around to establishing a new backup procedure yet, 
but I was going to over the weekend, honest!  I thought if the drive 
were to go bad, I would get some warning.  I've learned several lessons 
from this: do not build a computer from cheap parts and especially do 
not use power supplies with the "raidmax" brand.  Do not go more than 24 
hours without having some form of a backup.  If part of a system is 
acting funny, the whole thing may blow without warning.

Anyway, I am wondering if there is still any hope in recovering the data 
on the hard drive.  From what I can tell, the drive is not even spinning 
up.  The bios tries to detect it, but it times out.  My guess is that 
the drive platters are OK, but the circuitry to run the drive is damaged 
  in some way.  Perhaps just the power circuit is bad.  Is there 
anything I can try?  I know I could send the drive out to a recovery 
service to the tune of several hundred dollars, but my data isn't worth 
that much; just sentimental stuff and a huge inconvenience

Regards,
Jonathan