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

[Peter Jay Salzman]

On Tue 16 Jan 07,  8:24 PM, Jonathan Stickel <jjstickel1 at sbcglobal.net> said:
> 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

A really long time ago, I seem to recall Mike Simons mentioning he replaced
the power circuitry on a hard drive and was able to recover his data.  He
posted it to vox-tech (or maybe it was vox -- he might've posted it before I
even created vox-tech.

I might not even be remembering it correctly.  But you may want to either
search the archives or shoot him off an email if he's no longer subscribed
to these lists.

Pete