Picture the scene - you've got a 1TB hard drive thats full of important stuff, the next thing you know its dead!....
I had this happen to me - my home server (ie. spare machine that i just chucked stuff onto till I sorted something proper out) had become a bit of essential kit in the house. We had films, stuff for the kids you name it on there. So one day it stops responding so I reboot it - except the screen says there's no boot disk.... say what! - quickly take the case off, check all the cables, hell check everything and power up. Nope, its not happening - its gone - drive doesn't even spin up.
Words can't describe the feeling - but have a guess.
So I started to look around on the net for pointers - maybe this was an indentified issue, maybe I could "fix" this myself?. Hell I was desperate so was totally open to any ideas. Then I came across a site where they mentioned that quite often, as is the case with this particular model, the controller PCB on the underside of the drive is what's gone splat and so you can change it with an identical one and all will be well.
As sheer luck would have it - I'd actually bought 2 of these drives at the same time - identical model, but was only using 1 of them. So, quickly I removed the pcb from both units (you'll need a "hex" screwdriver - don't even "think" of trying something else - one wrong move and its bye bye pcb) and swapped them over. Take care with that "ribbon" cable you see below - those things break/rip/damage VERY easily.
A view of the PCB on the underside of the drive:
Power up and success! - the drive spins and a massive sigh of relief.
Except its not fixed.
Although the drive now powers up - its not doing much ( I had it plugged in using an external USB hard drive caddy thing - just saves time mounting/plugging/unplugging/unmounting it from the case) - no extra drive appears and the feeling of dread comes back.
So, quotes from mainstream "disaster recovery" places are well and truely off the menu. So I decided that my options were;
- Accept the loss - like hell!
- Try more extreme solutions...
I thought though, before I took a screwdriver to the drive - check google one more time.
And I found it - the answer. It seems that this drive stores the information about the way the disks in it are configured on a chip on the drive PCB. So simply swapping the boards over itsn't going to work - whilst I did solve the "power" problem that my drive obviously had, it didn't know how to then look at the disks inside it to work out where stuff was on them and thats why my drive still appeared to be dead.
So the solution is.... dead easy, simply unsolder the existing chip from the working PCB (which was now on my "dead" drive), and swap it with the same chip that was on the old PCB (that, in my case, had a power related problem). This chip, NVRAM as it's known is rather small and lets be honest here - SOLDER, ME? - last time I picked up a SOLDERING IRON was twenty years ago!
View the of the NVRAM chip on the drive PCB - its NOT the big diamond one in the centre - the NVRAM chip is that small square one underneath the large rectangular one.
Right.
Well, time to bite the bullet - no way could I afford to pay for it and as it turns out this make/model of drive has reliability issues, there's no way I'm going to use the spare one anyway so decision made.... I'm going in... With a hot iron....
So its tip time:
- NEVER use a soldering iron that has a large tip - its got to be a small pointed one - you need precision here.
- I worked on a basic golden rule - if I need to apply the iron to the chips pins for more than 1 second, I was doing it wrong and so needed to stop and wait a few mins to let things cool.
- Another golden rule - your ENTIRE drive depends on this working - you'll get one shot at this and only one shot, mess this up and there is absolutely no way you'll get stuff back from the drive. SO TAKE YOUR TIME!
- You do this entire process at your own risk - it worked for me, but if it doesn't for you then don't come complaining - I didn't hold a gun to your head did I?
- Yep - ANY guarantee will be totally voided by this!
- You'll need at the minimum - a soldering iron (obviously), some soldering wick and some spare solder.
- Before you switch the iron on - clean it up, so it shines and if that means scraping/filing it with a knife etc then do it - its gotta be shiny. Having done this - when its heated up - "tin" the iron by putting some solder on it - this will get it ready for use - which should be shiny.
- Get some sponge and make it wet - or wire wool - good for keeping the iron clean
- If you have never soldered before - use google! - there's loads of sites out there that will show you the basics!
- PRACTICE this process on something you don't want! - you'll only get one shot at this so don't go in blind!
- Before you start - MARK the chip in some way so you know which way round it should be on the board - my picture should give you a good idea....
I wanted to only have the iron on the chip for the smallest amount of time possible. The chip is so small that realistically, you aren't going to be able to remove each pin one at a time. So what I did was to ADD a load of solder to the pins when I started as this basically joined them together. This meant that I could now heat up all the pins on one side in one go as the heat would transfer to all of them at the same time. So I used some pliers to apply a slight "pull" to the chip - put the iron in the middle of the pins and when the solder melted the whole of that side came up from the PCB in one go!
Repeat the process on the other side and hey presto - one detached NVRAM chip! - a little bit of minor bending of the pins and cleaning up with Solder Wick.
Now do this with the NVRAM chip we want to keep - you've done this process already so things should be simple this time round.
Just remember to take your time and also remember - CHIPS hate heat - so use it sparingly.
When you have both chips off, position the old NVRAM chip on the board that works and get some solder and iron action going on.
IT DOESN'T HAVE TO LOOK PRETTY - IT JUST HAS TO WORK!
Heres what I was left with after mine - not bad for someone who, as I said, hasn't touched an iron in 20 odd years!
Once you have done this - give it a few mins to cool down, then plug it in (probably using an external USB drive thing ideally) and if everything has gone according to plan - your drive will spin up, your computer will detect it and everything is good!
It was in my case.
