Lucky save, HDD with shorted SATA connector - LFC
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 27 ก.ย. 2024
- This started out as an assumed lost-cause hard drive, but just as I was literally on the phone to the customer to say 'sorry your data has gone unless you want to send it to a lab' I remembered That One Time I Saw A HDD With A Dead Protection Diode and figured I'd try my luck.
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Regarding the Tweezers I mention in this video, I was mistaken - they're LCR tweezers, not hot tweezers. So not actually useful for this job.
Adamant IT yes you can see them in action @electronicsrepairschool
A better option to remove smt components is with a hot-air rework station. Basically it produces a small stream of hot air to melt the solder so you can remove it. Alternative you can use solder wick (braided copper) to remove solder from the PCB and component so it can be removed. That said the hot-air station is the preferred tool to rework PCB boards.
I've seen there are ~$15 solder iron tweezers online now on eBay and I assume Aliexpress. I ordered two additional SH72's with some J style tips and printed a holder on a local fab lab 3D printer to make portable tweezers. Haven't gotten around to assembling yet, since don't have the need. I'm still working on outdoors projects. Am planning to either use PlastiDip or Type 2 silicone coating on the 3D printed part also to seal and provide a little better grip. Thanks for sharing... makes me want to check my bin of HD's to see what might still have some life left.
Hey adamant IT. Quick question, if I have a 1080ti where 1 fan might be shorted, and the card only shows black screen when booting, what options do I have? Have disconnected all fans, but it wont boot. Is there something I could swap out or check with a meter?
@@runehansen278 If the fans have three wires (speed feedback), its possible the card will not run with the fans disconnected. One option is to try running the fans (12VDC or 5VDC depending on fan voltage) to see if they work. Also check the fan power pins to see if the card is supplying power to the fans.
Massive thank you for this guide! I found myself in a similar situation with my backup drive failing to spin and a short on the 12v line. Informed by your content, I ventured to remove the diode, and to my delight, the diode was shorted out of the circuit and... I'm now successfully recovering my data!
As someone with minimal experience in electronics, particularly with circuit boards and soldering, I was initially apprehensive. However, your clear explanations and practical tips made the process not only achievable but genuinely enjoyable. Channels like yours are a treasure trove for novices like myself, empowering us to tackle technical challenges with confidence and enthusiasm. Your work is not only educational but truly life-saving regarding data recovery. Keep up the fantastic work - you're making a significant impact!
where and how did you find replacement diode ? can you find a compatible one in any old devices pcb ?
@Adamant_IT Thank you, Graham! I received a laptop yesterday, which would not POST when the SATA 1TB Seagate HDD was connected. I removed the HDD, removed the PCB from the HDD, and checked for shorts. The 5V rail was shorted all over the PCB. I injected voltage, starting with 1V and 1A, increasing to 3V and 1A. The diode got hot, which caused me to remember YOUR video! I removed the diode, and the HDD worked perfectly after I reassembled it and connected it to the SATA port. Since I have no use for this HDD, I did this purely as an experiment and for my training experience. Thanks ever so much for planting THIS video into my brain for future use, two years later.
4:45 You could have also talked about rust accumulation over time here. Right above you left hand finder are the contacts pads that connect the board with the HDD head. Overtime those pads can develop a layer of rust (Your HDD already have some. Its that yellow discoloration) and this can cause the HDD to have a lot of R/W errors. This can make a HDD look like it has bad sectors or is dyeing but in reality its just a bad connection between the Head and the Board.
Cleaning it can bring the HDD back to fully function.
Saved 2 Seagate 2TB HDDs by cleaning it.
@Mr Guru There are many types of rust. Its defensively rust just not the usual green/blue rust that you usually see from water damage.
very interesting.. it's also visible around the 3 screw holes @4:41.. what causes oxidation to occur gradually like that?
@@duroxkilo
As far as I know the type of rust that aren't chemical are related to heat, humidity, and oxygen concentration and the type of metal. Also the flow of electricity can accelerate the process.
Oxidation will happen overtime to all metals. Some are more resistant than others.
Aluminium for example is very resistant to oxidation because it rapidly form a thin aluminium oxide layer that impedes the metal from entering in contact with oxygen.
For those kind of applications the best metal to use is Gold. That is why Memory and CPU terminals are usually Gold plated. Gold is very resistant to oxidation and a excellent conductor but its also expensive. Idk what metal they are using to plate those terminals but due to their color its definitely not gold.
I had a TVS diode go on a WD from my parents' PVR which had a PSU pumping out too many volts on the 5V rail - luckily this meant I could recover the recordings - I went down the road of replacing the entire board and swapped out the BIOS chip which matches the drive. Deep diving into it I learnt that the two TVS diodes for 5V and 12V work in conjunction with R64 and R67 (0 Ohms) so that the current shunts down to ground via the diodes and either blows the diode and/or the resistor to prevent damage to components further downstream - very sensible design IMO. Like you say - get the data off ASAP! Nice tip on using testdisk for MBR recovery :)
Excellent video!
English is not my native language (i'm greek), but with this clear pronunciation and analytic speech, i understood everything. Thank you.
Hello there! I know we don't know each other, but I wanted to let you know, that you saved my memories of over 12 years I already thought were lost. I had a similar HardDrive which did not work anymore and I thought let's give it a shot. Fortunately I already had a multimeter as I started a little with microcontrollers and Arduino. I then watched another video on how to set a multimeter to continuity mode ( I am a nooby with electronics) and had the same issue. This is why I love the internet. Anyway I just wanted to let you know that you made my day! ❤ Dankeschön from Germany 😊
Graham, you rock! Your vids are so educational. I appreciate that you take PC hardware troubleshooting to the next level from where most people would be comfortable. I'm sure that you are inspiring many people to attempt repairs that they might otherwise give up on. I hate to see technology go into the trash for want of a minor repair
Just a heads up (to viewers and author alike), @14:01 DO NOT write to the actual disk!
That is very bad practice: If there are deeper faults with the drive you may make the drive forever unrecoverable. The customer will be less than happy if any future attempts to recover data (by say a specialist lab/company) are thwarted by your inadvisable write to the failing drive.
What you actually want to do: perform a sector by sector copy to a doner hdd or image file. Testdisk will also work against an image file (the linux and windows versions have been used this way by this commentor)
When you were going through the folders "s.....s....s....s.....s" I was thinking 'oh no, it's porn isn't it?'
I was asked to look at one of these contraptions for someone and the directory structure was exactly the same - baffling. I understand that they are designed to be used by clueless people but there is no need to make things deliberately obscure.
Epic moment!
Testdisk sounds useful. Thank You!
I enjoy this kind of videos which are more down to earth than some other it repairing computer videos, where everything has to be top of the line with super expensive graphics cards and water liquid cooling otherwise is just utterly garbage.
One thing that might help you, instead of rebooting/replugging the disk to have the new partition scheme read, you might just use a 'partprobe' command which forces kernel to read the partition scheme from the disk again, eg. 'partprobe /dev/sdaX'
Thank you very very much. WD 4TB Black saved thanks to your tutorial. Very simple fix. Have been looking everywhere for the correct replacement diode. As shown above, removing this works just fine :)
Most importante is you made this job with simple tools that anyone can atleast copy or rapair at home with simple soldering iron.... this is one of best how to do chanel.
Hi Adam,
Great video! Just watching you solder and un-solder things has helped me massively as I was really weak with my soldering skills.
Glad to hear! I'm no soldering master by any means, but if I'm giving people the courage to have a go and practise for themselves, then mission accomplished!
I removed the diode on an old 80gb drive today and was able to remove the data. Thanks a bunch for sharing!
You are the Diod picking lawyer
This exact solution saved me something from 400-1000 dollars. Brilliant solution. And it worked. Thank you so much.
Yeah It worked for me. Thanks for your great explanation. After i watched your video, i did all what you showed and my HDD is back now.
Great video, first time I hear about testdisk, definitely will use it for further disk restorations 👌👌
I had a IDE hard drive of 250gb with only 130 hours of run time on the clock, there are no bad sectors on the hard drive what so ever, but one day, i had to backup a laptop, and when i plugged that drive into its supplied adapter, there was smelly black smoke comming out of the enclosure, so i took out the drive, removed the board, and yes, a blown up diode, i replaced that diode, and now, 3 years later, this drive still works perfectly fine, with no bad sectors what so ever
Absolutely brilliant graham,thankyou for
Posting,i really enjoyed this,thankyou
Awesome info, Great video, Thanks.
Thank you so much for this video. I've just removed a diode from the PCB of a Samsung HDD (it shattered when I gripped it with the tweezers) and am now, hopefully, recovering the data :)
Thank you so much! Removed diode and the drive works!!!
Thank you. I watch your channel from time to time and I was lucky that you tackled Testdisk because I kinda needed someone to show me how to use it to recover a corrupt microSD card with video files in it. Thanks to your quick guide, I recovered those important clips and even past/erased ones.
LifeSaver!! Thanks for pointing this pesky little diode out for me! I could smell his magic soul release even though i took caution and used a 9v supply because I couldnt find my original WD 12v psu. Im up and running now with a dedicated sata/usb converter kit on piggy back. But I found this video from a link in the comments of a dissasembly vid and it turned out to pay off BIG TIME!!!! My rather ancient TB is a TB nonetheless, of basically my entire digital life memory! THANKS from Texas! Cheers!
Mac is the test machine and Windows is the production machine. Sounds about right!
Thank you so much for the video!!!
Subbed!
Good trouble shooting. Many times a a multi-meter is all that you need along with focused rational thinking. Reminds me of my days on a test bench in the Marines working on power supplies. Diodes are usually part of power supply problems ie, not turning on. You might want to get yourself a nice table mount vice grip to hold the things in place while soldering. Also, I would wick away that extra solder on the board before reinstalling. It can cause other problems.
an ode to dye by a dyslectic:
diode
Fantastic sir , exellent
Very helpful I had a PSU issue and ended up with a smelly smoking HDD
I bought an Identicle drive and swapped the boards after also swapping the bios chip and my drive was recognised but unreadable.
I assumed it was a FW issue so swapped everything back over and ordered a board to try to reflash. After watching your video I decided to check the diodes and mine were also shorted
( which had I'd have realised they were zenners I'd have checked them before tearing another drive to pieces). Anyway took the zenner out and am getting recognised drive with no partitions asking to be formatted. I've just downloaded test disk ( free) good call and I'm just about to see if I can get my data back thanks
Hi there. I watched your Video and i has a HDD with exact the same error. i removed the z-diode and see, the hard disk works again. thank you for that Video!
Man, my hard drive is the same issue I believe. It was shorted and smoked on me. And I’ve asked 2 local techs about it and they said it’s a LAB job. I wish you where here in the states. Because seems like you know how to fix it
Nice sir....Iam preparing ready for my hd recovery....Tq...
thank you for that very help fall
Thats pretty cool. Never hear of TestDisk before. I'll definitely have to play with this one!
2 quick issues:
1. Not all drives will 'com to life' by the REMOVAL of the TVS diode ... (Seagate does I gelieve)
2. Always clone patient drive before messing with the data... :)
The approach to the drive's data was contrary to 'best practices'.
It's generally unwise to write to the "patient drive" ... better would've been (even using free programs) to have used something like DD Recovery (and DO HAVE IT LOG, it can be very useful) ... create either an image on a drive (strengths and weaknesses to images) or clone the drive to a drive that at minimum has the number of sectors (in size) ≤ than the 'offset' to the last sector used ... ... then ONLY MAKE CHANGES TO THE DRIVE YOU'VE JUST CLONED; (especially if you're going to edit that partition in any way).
Thank your for another good video ...
Thank you so much, just saved a 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD with your help :D
In case of any doubts, this protection diode did its job, going to short circuit and saving the rest of the electronic components on the PCB. This is not a regular Zener diode, but the so-called TVS diode or a transil. In case of a voltage spike on input the short circuit to ground causing the faulty PSU to shut down. They can absorb pretty high energy.
yeah they say we can use it without TVS diode but without using it doesnt mean that we are open for new troubles ??
@@seckinseckin3919 For testing/data recovery purpose, it is fine to run without it. Of course, assuming we are using a reliable power source.
What a neat find! Saved the customer a lot of money too! Also, loving that Reimu wallpaper at the end. I get giddy when I see people representing Touhou these days.
👌I'm not super into the games or lore, but there's a lot of incredible art from the Touhou fandom
@@Adamant_IT I am in the exact same boat, the art is amazing! Some of the music remixes are good too!
I've seen zener diodes being used as voltage regulators before, particularly on a Commodore 64 for powering the cassette drive motors. The rail put out somewhere between 10-12V I believe but the tape drive needed something like 7 or 8 volts, can't remember as it was years ago but that's what the zener was rated at and since it starts conducting at that voltage it clamped the voltage down to the needed amount because everything "excess" got shorted to ground basically.
Very effective however if it fails open circuit it unleashes the non regulated voltage to the motors, thankfully it survived when I accidentally did that. It was shorted initially which is why the tape drive wasn't spinning
Hot tip... The spring pins that go to the pads leading to the motor are a source of failure and frustration. Whenever I remove a board that has them I bend the pins upward just a little so they make better contact with the pads leading to the motor. If the pins don't put adequate pressure on those pads then the coils in the motor don't get sufficient current flowing for the controller to detect a properly functioning motor and so it spins up and down over and over. Vrrrrup frrrrrr.. vrrrup frrrrrr.. like its cursing at you. lol.
Oh aye, I've heard a drive do that before... cheers for the tip!
little tip: RAW drive can sometimes be readable on Linux.
(without running any tools and\or commands)
thanks. removing the shorted diode made the hdd run again.
ClickFree's developer clearly had a bad keyboard with an intermittently stuck "s" key on it
Thanks a lot !! I was also facing the same problem, and solved it removing this diode too ! Lucky like you :))
you are amazing thank you very much
I had that issue once so far. Those are called TVS diodes but yeah I guess you could call them zenner diodes as they work pretty much the same.
Good analysis, I learned a lot! Thanks.
This is awesome!
Educational and enjoyable content. Good stuff. Thanks.
I would have plugged it into my bench pc :o lesson learnt.
What I'd have done differently:
DD to an image, mount the image & run testdisk against that.
If something goes wrong in the process you've only screwed up your image & still have the original to either try again or send to a lab.
Yes, always clone the disk, even if you know it's going to work.
That is Hughely useful to me. I thank you in kind!!
hi Adam! glad you decided to undo everything just to show us!
His name is Graham :)))
@@comicsanz97 I thought he was actually Adam Ant 1980s pop star which is why he looks like a highwayman.
@@reggiedixon2 adamant (adj): unshakable or insistent especially in maintaining a position or opinion : unyielding
@@markanderson2904 Thanks I think, English is my first language so I am well aware what adamant means and I quote: "Stand and deliver, your money or your life"
Interesting video. Considering the drive's diode was already toast, I hardly blame you for not wanting to use the original enclosure again. I'll just throw my two cents in... Having done a small amount of recovery from external enclosures that were sold with pre-installed HDDs I've seen some that use an intentional partition offset for the user's data. In those cases the SATA board in the enclosure is often designed to appear as two devices-- an HDD *and* a small CDROM drive or pre-loaded read only partition (inside the offset area) that contains the advertised and included software for backing up etc. You would see the drive using two drive letters, but each drive letter might show as different device types. If that's the case, then connecting it to any other SATA interface other than the one it came with will show the drive as uninitialized since the layout is intentionally non-standard. I'm guessing you might have unknowingly encountered one of those weird enclosures.
As soon as I saw Western Digital I had a reflex action and reached for the rubbish bin.
Thank you
How. Proud of you my man
thanks to you mine saved the same way.
Very cool. Thanks.
Your data recovery videos have saved countless Gigabytes!
Would you consider doing lost partition recovery too?
this is my issue, that i cant fix!!...i have a seagate 2tb with a dead pcb!...for month i tryed to fix but i cant locate the problem! there was no 12V signal! every few weeks i pick up this pcb and try!
for the most time, i miss out the two "zero ohms resistors"..they have marks in the middle and u cant read the "0"...there is something that blown this 0 ohms resistors out.I guess these 0ohms are a kind of fuse!
anyway i changed the Diode, but still nothing. No short to ground at all but nothing happens! Drive wont turn on....
something to remember..
reflow with low melting point solder works well too!
wow...very useful to know this, never would have though. Thanks for the video xD
"You put it to another enclosure". That's not always true because 2,5" external drives have dual USB connectors soldered to their board instead of SATA connectors like on regular hard drives you can find in any store.
David M that’s a Toshiba trick 😒
@@steve.Lowles Didn't know that. I saw that on WD drive first.
Nice, I had fix the same problem 6 years ago.. Nice video
Hi Adamant. Love your content, I have a suggestion, I am trying to follow in your footsteps, however all my knowledge is self taught, and I realize there are gaps in my knowledge, something that would help is a series of videos, just for training. Like starting from the beginning. Most of that I would know, but it's the organized and methodical pace that would help me fill in the gaps. Anyways, that might not be something you want to do, but I think it would really help as I can't find a lot of tutorials that aren't in Hindi.
Rare to see a Western Digital HDD fail. For me i had 2 Seagate just randomly died (Both ST500). My speculation was the board because i could see the PCB seems like corroding, it has spin and drive would show up in bios.. but when in windows it would just tap out and not show up
I had bad Western Digital too that died but thats on me. One day it got suddenly housed by an ant inside my PC case while i was away for a day. In my panic i throwed the disk out and... went full linustechtips... now the drive is just on my balcony as a reminder to myself to always put extra care to my data i lost that i cannot recover
That laptop made me laugh
Thanks Man.
Great fix fair play. Well done
Didn't quite catch what you said @ 8:59, but if it was Hot Tweezers by Mini (as in Miniware) they aren't Hot Tweezers but Tweezed Digital Multimeter.
Big thumbs up, thanks.
Just subscribed, great videos learning a lot :)
irony of repair guy : they can repair any customer's stuff, but some times they don't have time to repair their own lcd laptop 🤣🤣
You make great videos
"Clickfree" for a HDD name, seen in a video about data recovery... :)
Thank you awsome video!
Yup those tvs diodes can only take a limited number of hits and then they go shorted.
I was recommended a video of yours the other day about a possible faulty 1080 Ti, and I was going to give it a miss, but then I noticed LFC who are my football team, and Adam Ant, who I was daft about as a teenager, so I gave it a watch LOL ... Turns out it was a great video so I subscribed ... I knew it wasn't going to be about Liverpool or Adam Ant, but it piqued my interest ...
Well he does "Stand and Deliver" 😁
@Crazy Clown, Im a sparky by trade, yes I notice majority of exaust fan coils go open, never come across one that has a ahort (yet), I find most motors that come in (usually for rewinding - these are 3 phase industrial size) they are usually are shorted between turns, on very rare occation they open but usually they are in for a warranty claim (only heard but never handed one that is open circuit).
Hmmm.. I have a about half a dozen old disks in a box that went bad. Time to check them out. One or two of them had nasty scratching sounds though.
Great Super video
Excellent
Learned alot. Thanks.
well, im in a similar spot, new psu fried 3 hdds, i was gonna swap the pcbs but i think im gonna check this real quick, just gotta run to the hardware store to get new fuses for my meter because they blew up working on a quad last week, thanks for the idea
Hi, i'm in DR field.
Protection diodes on 12V and 5V rail are not ZENER but TVS diodes (Transient Voltage Suppressor).
Cool video :)
Oh neat, fair enough! I've often seen them referred to as Rectifier Diodes as well. Is there a particular difference, or is it just specialised for the particular task?
A zener is one of two types of diode based TVS's. The other is a form of thyristor.
TVS is a generic term that also includes gas discharge tubes and MOV's. The Zener reacts in 50 ps and can go down to 3v and can dissipate small amounts of power.. the tyristor type only goes down to about 30v and cannot dissipate any real power. It reacts in about 3ns. So tis is indeed a Zener.
You will often find two or more different types of TVS in paralell in order to allow them to work to their strengths. Gas discharge tubes handle very high voltages butvthey are slow. MOV's are medium speed and medium voltage and can dissipate quite a bit of power. Thyrister TVS diodes are similar voltage but much faster. Zeners are low voltage but very fast.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient-voltage-suppression_diode
@@Adamant_IT yes rectifiers and zeners are completely different. Rectifiers only pass power one direction. If you manage to exceed its breakdown voltage it is toast. Not so with zeners. They are designed to conduct in reverse without damage.
I love your technique of step back forth ! But I can’t take it anymore and want to save you very much time ! On amazon they sell sticks of low melt soldier apply that first with hot iron and heat up slowly with air station that. Will help you on the long run and save very much time
Man, I almost forgot how good testdisk was, thank you for reminding me how powerful it is.
Also subscribed and liked your video, awesome work.
Greetings from the "island" of Costa Rica!
P.D: if you actually know where Costa Rica is, you'll know that we ain't an island... lol
Iam lucky to see this great video thanks
All about learning something Adam! Thanks for sharing this with us!
He is called Graham, his business is called Adamant IT.
Hunter's Moon Thanks for correction, I am somewhat new to his channel.
@Adamant IT Graham -- in TestDisk, when you had to make an educated guess between the drive having MBR or GPT, what would have been the outcome if you had selected GPT instead of MBR?
My guess is that it wouldn't have found the partitions, since I would be looking for the wrong type. If it hadn't found anything on the quick search, I'd go back and select GPT before searching again. If I _still_ found nothing, I'd do the Deeper search after the quick search. Deep search takes a long time though, so be prepared to wait if you end up on that route.
@@Adamant_IT Thanks for the response.
Yep, One of my mates called me a couple of years ago asking whether I could fix a hard drive that had all his wedding and photos of his kids growing up on it. He had dropped it and his wife was giving him a headache about it and could I help. It was a diode on the actual drive control board. It is sacrificial and the drive can live without it if removed but, knowing what he is like and that it was probably nothing to do with dropping it but more likely that somebody used another PSU, I swapped it out properly. I guess I should have done a video about it lol.
Good question: got 2 HP G62 laptops, 1 is AMD & the 2nd is Intel. Can the HDD from the AMD be mounted in the Intel case & work? Or, how can I tell if the screen & keyboard will work - Intel to AMD case? Thanks 🤓
You're a machine