Burned Controller on Drive

My friend removed a hard drive he was having trouble with.

I looked at it and can see a small burn mark on one of the chips and between two of its pins.

He doesn't want to use a data recovery service (can't afford it)
He has a few data files he would like to remove from the drive if possible. He did not have a backup of the data files.

Two questions:

Is it possible to slave this drive in another computer assuming the head etc is OK?

If not:
Can the printed circuit controller board attached to the drive be
replaced with one from a duplicate size, (same manufacturer, model etc) drive and allow access?

The drive is a 10 GB Quantum drive.

Yes, you can hook it up as a slave drive in another computer, but if the chip really is burned out it probably won't be readable.

It's certainly possible to replace the circuit board yourself (it's about the only thing that can be done outside a clean room), but it must be absolutely identical in all respects, including firmaware revision. You may find these articles helpful:

200 ways to recover a hard drive (PDF)

hard drive revival

Thanks, I'll try to find another identical drive and/or controller for sale.

Just wondering why it may not be readable as a slave?

I thought a slave drives uses the controller on the master drive and the controller on the slave is completely disabled.

Update:
Got what seems to be an identical drive controller off Ebay and screwed it to the drive we need the data off of.
The 10 Gig Qauantum is installed in an old Gateway computer and seems to be autodetecting in the BIOS/CMOS setup program correctly.

Result:
Can't boot with the hard drive.When system tries the following message is displayed:
A disk read error occurred
Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart


Also; Can't access the drive after booting with a floppy diskette.

Fdisk information shown below, but first received this message executing FDISK.

"Your computer has NTFS partitions which may require large drive support. If you are using another operating system such as Windows NT, which supports large drives, you should enable treating these partitions as large. Note: if you answer Y and the partition display looks incorrect or a hang or a crash occurs do nothing, run Fdisk again, and answer no to the question.
Should NTFS partitions on all drives be treated as large (Y/N) [Y]"

Status...........Type....................MBytes..................Usage
..A..................NTFS................... 9531.....................100%


Total disk space is 504 MBytes


504 MB??
Any ideas? Thanks

Kind of sounds like the bios in this old Gateway can't handle the size of a 10gb drive.

Thanks for the quick reply Doc, that's what I was thinking.
Anyone else?

What type (which win version) boot disk did you use above when you ran fdisk?

One note.... While it is promising that the system booted here and was able to recognize the presence of the drive, this alone does not confirm that the swapping of the circuitboard successfully solved the problem (made the drive useable again). It might have, we don't know for sure yet. But the fact that you got that disk access error is often a sign that the circuitboard replacement is not in fact 100% compatible with the one it was swapped out for (don't know for sure yet, but...) Now it could also be a sign of something else, like the fact that drive corruption occurred when the drive initially went bad.

And one other thing worth mentioning (sort of after the fact here)... When you swap a circuitboard it is possible if the wrong board (not a proper match) is substituted that it can destroy the drive and its data. It is a risk that does exist going in to such an operation. The swapping operation is not necessarily as easy and safe as "either it works or it doesn't". That's why I (personally) generally hesitate to offer board swapping as a data recovery option to people, unless they are willing to run the risk of loosing all should things go astray. I'm not saying that happened here, just raising the issue/warning.

What type (which win version) boot disk did you use above when you ran fdisk?

I used a Windows 98 boot diskette with the FDISK program on it.

With just this rigged up hard drive in there, the only way I am booting up is with this Windows 98 floppy.

The fact that the drive reports a NTFS style partition proves this drive can be read, No?

The fact that the dirve is at least being seen as NTFS formatted is indeed a positive sign. The win98 boot disk is not going to let you read anything off that drive, but...

The issue seems to now relate to the fact that the system can't boot off the drive (disk read error), and that may simply be because the Gateway your trying it in can't handle the size of the drive (bios limitation). You need to get that drive in a system whos bios you know can handle the size and test further there.

The 10 GB drive is now installed physically in a Compaq DeskPro 4000 spare he had.
He installed it on the secondary IDE channel.
(The Gateway it was in would not support this size drive without the BIOS being upgraded to a newer style)

This Compaq computer Deskpro 4000 contains an originally installed hard drive also... a 2.4 GB Western Digital Caviar, and is installed on the primary IDE channel.

The floppy drive has been physically removed to make room.

Having trouble determining if this model Compaq can support this 10 GB drive because I seem to be getting a limited amount of BIOS setup options when using the CTRL+ F10 key during boot up. For example, the option for boot priority appear but not much else.

In fact the message about the "Press F10 key to enter setup" or similar has been replaced with a message saying Compaq Deskpro 4000 in the lower right hand corner, but only when I press CTRL + F10 and F10 again.

My understanding is hard drives over 7.8 GB require INT13 BIOS extensions or LBA to access the hard drive. I cannot find where in the COMPAQ'S BIOS this option is available or setable.

Also the Compaq computer has made a single beep just one time during my many power on off cycles.The rest of the times... no beeps at all.

So...I cannot determine if this Compaq DeskPro computer supports this 10 GB drive.
Any help with the Compaq BIOS setup program would be appreciated. Any other help would be welcome as well, I'm not very familar with Compaq computers. Thanks a lot

Tried running the COMPAQ ROMPaq available for download from HP and no luck.
Created the diskette and could not accomplish anything with it.
Message about not enough disk space when trying to create a DIAGNOSTIC PARTITION.

My understanding is that this is due to there being an existing OS on the drive. The program seems to expect the drive to be empty before beginning.

My plan now is to locate another computer with built in BIOS support for drives of 10 GB or more and which is running XP and the NTFS file system. Setting it up as a slave in such a computer we can pull the data files off.

For the Compaq BIOS check the Rompaq that is what updates the bios.

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/files/

You say you've tried this in a DeskPro 4000, but question its ability to natively support the 10gb drive. If this system is running XP as the OS it is irrelevant in your case here whether the bios supports the 10gb drive. Since you just want to have it as a slave drive (and a non-boot drive) you can actually just set the drive detection (for secondary slave in this case) to None. This way the bios itself will not even worry about the drive. However, XP will still see and be able to access the drive because it does not care what the bios thinks/knows about the drive. XP completely bypasses the bios and deals directly with the HD. And since XP can obviously handle a 10gb drive... Follow?

Thanks guys.
Train, I have already created the correct ROMPaq diskette and tried working with it....no luck.The program does not fully execute to install, upgrade or modify the special Compaq partition or the existing Windows 98 drive, nor the Windows XP drive in any Master/ Slave configuration we tried..... alone or together.

DrMDJ,
The system on the target drive is XP but it does not boot when configured as the Master, even though FDISK reports the drive as Active...It reports "A disk read error occurred"

The pre-existing drive in this Compaq system is booting up with Windows 98 if I recall correctly......not Windows XP.

Ah. OK, I thought the boot drive was xp and you could just slave this drive you are trying to salvage. Oh well.