I call upon the Gh1er's to help!

P

Park Edwards

Veteran
Okay, so this is the deal. I had an external HDD that has 2 scenes that I shot for a short film and my drive looks like it died and desperately need it. Not the disk inside the drive, but the "logic board" on the drive. I'm 85% sure as I've had 2 techs look at it and we've all come up with the same consensus. I need to replace the board and here's to hoping someone out there can help me. This is what I need from you.

The drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.B

Part Number P/N: 0A38110
Model Number M/N: HDT721064SLA380
Capacity: 640GB
Sata 3.0 Gb/s
Some kind of barcode number: 0A38110BA30130C91 JAN-2009

Here's a link to a place who's supposedly has them in stock:
http://www.compsource.com/pn/0A38110/Hitachi_196/

Please look to see if you have this lying around or in your computer and would be willing to exchange for another hard drive. I'm at mercy here. Help!!
 
I recommend not trying to replace board yourself If there was head crash, new board won't help. What's worse, every disc has it's "no fly zone" which is embedded into EPROM on board. You risk making things worse.

If you found out that disc doesn't work and you value the data more than 1000 bucks, don't do anything more with it. Ship it to data forensics laboratory.
If your footage isn't worth 1000 bucks or so, it's up to you.
 
Grunf said:
I recommend not trying to replace board yourself If there was head crash, new board won't help. What's worse, every disc has it's "no fly zone" which is embedded into EPROM on board. You risk making things worse.

If you found out that disc doesn't work and you value the data more than 1000 bucks, don't do anything more with it. Ship it to data forensics laboratory.
If your footage isn't worth 1000 bucks or so, it's up to you.
Click to expand...

thanks, i know exactly what i'm doing. done it before. i'm not going to drop 700 to save the files on the hdd.
 
If I had a matching drive I'd send it your way. The board swap should work, especially in this case.
 
I found a reference to a guy who had a similar problem which was traced to a shorted diode (ZD3?) on the board. Maybe you could find that forum? Seems like they talked about directions to fix it.
 
thanks guys. i've been searching high and low. you're speaking of the guy on hdguru forums. he didn't post any examples of what diode he's talking about or else i'd go that route. i'm coming in close on a board, so crossing fingers, that should work. i haven't lost hope yet. This is more confounding than ICP's Magical Mysteries
 
Okay, looks like i'm pursuing another route. going after the TVS diode. Thanks guys and to Tester13 for originally pointing that out. I tell you, that guys is something else.
 
actually it was that exact drive that crapped out on me 8)
the external drive wouldn't even boot up just being plugged into a wall. so i took the HDD out of the enclosure and put it on my pc. the pc won't even boot with the drive hooked in. after reading forums about this same problem, i've been lead down a path where the 1st possible solution is the TVS diode.

I'm going to give this diode test a shot and if it doesn't work the pcb board switch is my next goal. The downside to that is it has to be EXACT everything. Down to the weeks in firmware.

thanks for the link.
 
You might want to place that order first since it looked like there was just one left. You can always return it via Amazon - usually painless.
 
The Deskstars were known not so affectionately as Deathstars when IBM still had the line before they sold it off. A bunch of my drives died. Sorry to hear about your troubles - seems Hitachi hasn't done much to fix the original flaws with these drives.
 
Success! I was able to recover my data! I didn't have to purchase another HDD or a Logic (PCB) board to obtain it. A simple removal of 2 diodes booted the hdd and I recovered every bit of data left on the drive. Hooray! Now to the tedious process of editing.
 
photoSmart42 said:
The Deskstars were known not so affectionately as Deathstars when IBM still had the line before they sold it off. A bunch of my drives died. Sorry to hear about your troubles - seems Hitachi hasn't done much to fix the original flaws with these drives.
Click to expand...


Hitachi drives are now amongst the best (alongside Samsung and Western Digital) in the larger 1-2Tb range. Maxtor/Seagate drives have been very dodgy with the compnay even having to issue firmware fixes to stop them dying within hours of being installed. This isn't so bad if its an internal drive but for external drives it is very hard to upgrade fw as you need to get them out of their enclosures first. Not really worth the hassle, better just to avoid altogether.

Oh, and remember that 100% OF HARD DRIVES FAIL. Always back up to a seperate drive, and don't use a NAS as it isn't meant for data backup (only data storage).
 
Car3o said:
Success! I was able to recover my data! I didn't have to purchase another HDD or a Logic (PCB) board to obtain it. A simple removal of 2 diodes booted the hdd and I recovered every bit of data left on the drive. Hooray! Now to the tedious process of editing.
Click to expand...

Hi Rich: Excellent news. Your persistence is impressive!

I always try to have at least 2 backups of all my video files at all times, but sometimes I forget temporarily when things get rushed. Eventually I'm sure I'll get bit in the *ss when one of my drives decides to die when I don't have a backup. But having made that mistake before I hope I've learned my lesson.

Again, great work, and I'm glad everything worked out.
 
Did you say that it will not boot up out of the case inside of your pc? Check your jumpers if it is an IDE drive, but the bad news is that if it wont spin up inside the pc (out of the case it is in) then the drive is toast.
 
Car3o said:
Success! I was able to recover my data! I didn't have to purchase another HDD or a Logic (PCB) board to obtain it. A simple removal of 2 diodes booted the hdd and I recovered every bit of data left on the drive. Hooray! Now to the tedious process of editing.
Click to expand...

Well done on the fix but I'm gonna be cheeky here with my first (necro-)post and say
How about some pics and details so that we may learn from your success!
I always find it frustrating when someone posts a problem and then fixes it by themselves without sharing the nitty gritty :2vrolijk_08:

I'm off to find out if the GH1 CCD is on the firmware PCB or not as I have two of them and want to swap the less noisy CCD over to the GH13
 
Hello there. Sorry for not explaining the details. I'll see if I can find the pictures of the HDD, as I don't have it anymore, and show you the diodes I removed. If you ever have HDD problem, check this place out. Helped me a lot.


http://www.techsupportforum.com/forums/f16/

edit: found picture

https://doc-14-as-docs.googleuserco...2829731&hash=41ejc48gfvd898007bdf277eubu0lrsq

If you look at the bottom, there are a row of diodes. D4, D2 and D3. These diodes act a protector. If say there's a spike in the voltage from your power supply, those diodes block it out. Once in a while they can die and cause your hdd from booting up. The fix is to remove the bad diodes and your hdd will boot up. However there's a chance, if you have a cheap power supply, the voltage coming from the supply can spike at the moment you're recovering the data and kill the hdd all together. So it's crucial you recover your data and just throw the bad hdd away. The D4, D2 diodes are normally the ones that are bad. To test the bad diode you need a multi-meter.
 
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