So I was trying out a removeable drive rack last night in my computer and wasn't having much luck. I of course powered down between swapping drives and removeable tray units, etc.. For some reason, I suddenly smelled burning plastic for a few seconds but everything seemed okay.. then later when I went to use my main drive again, the BIOS wasn't seeing it attached.. I disconnected it, plugged in another drive and was doing some other things, then when I switched back to the main drive this morning, it wasn't spinning up. The power supply is about 2 months old, ThermalTake 420 watt, all the voltages tested good today.. so the motherboard was taking longer and longer to get into the BIOS and then eventually stopped POSTing.. I pulled all the cards, all the drive cables, them ram, everything but the CPU and the PC speaker.. No error beeps.. I have an older Athlon motherboard (which I don't have RAM for), which gives me error beeps just fine with this CPU installed on it. So the CPU is good.. The motherboard is going back to Gigabyte under warranty.. But what the heck happened to my system?! the drive rack deal looks fine internally.. I also need to locate a reliable but cheap recovery center for the drive.. I was quoted $700 if it's an electronics problem, $900 if the motor is bad in the drive. Or is there any way I can revive this myself? Just plugged into the power supply with no IDE cable, the drive won't spin up.. doesn't smell at all like something is stuck, etc.. It's a Seagate 'U Series 5' from a few years ago, warranty expired Jan 14 of 2004 :( The drive has been *perfect* up until now..

Safety First unplug the PC from the wall, take out the processor as well, check the heat sink to make sure there is heat transfer jelly between it and the heat sink, generally white. Some people call it grease, lol. This may sound funny but isolate each part and smell it. If you smell any part that is burnt remove it from the system. Go outside first if you must after a short while you wont be able to determine where the smells are coming from. Put each part into an antistatic bag for smelling. There are many other possabilites to your problems, considering you smelt something burning leads me to think something shorted out. That can be caused from several things as well, bad power supplies, surges, phone line surges. You said your power supply is fine have you hooked it up to a volti-meter to check consistancy of your Power supply ratings? A note if something is shorting out. I always recommend that people use APS AC to DC filtered power with a surge protector to boot, but if something is shorting out you should promptly unplug everything from it and any other systems as it wont stop the power to the pc in event of shorts, causing Fires, do not leave your pc plugged in either while away, physically unplug it... Check your Power chord as well the rating make sure its for a 420 watt power supply. They make different chords for different rated power supplies. Some external drives have fuses. I would recommend you goto the website of the manufactured item and email them for review documentation to determine its not a simple fuse. I do not know your level of experise either. Did you try Seagates drive utilities available at there website? Also depending on your drive rack which one and how its installed replace all drive cables hooked to the rack, make sure the ribbon cables didnt get burned by the processor or pinched in case closings. Make sure if its an IDE Internal no chords got reversed RED PIN 1 always both sides should match dont rely on the gap on the drives, some manufacturers reverse those. If you have a spare Power supply I would plug a new one in, and hook it up to the rack drive, as well to see if it posts. If your drive is dead you will not have a lot of luck to fix it yourself. I have taken several apart lol in spare time. Unless you have a dustless environment to work in, special gloves and replacement hard disk to install platters into, and a space suit "You should be laughing I hope". You can get drive data recovered but it is extremely expensive. Consider buying used drives from Ebay, or used drives from local computer shopes.. I hope I have helped out some.. Sincerely, Joe Christian

PS.. Forgot USE a---> Grounding strap when working on your pc to prevent shortages of static charges to your parts, which can add up to thousands of volts. And always unplug your pc when working on it, never work on one that is powered on.. :) Sincerely, Joe Christian

Hi Joe, thanks for the info. It's an internal drive rack, so it's fairly simple. No fuses, etc. all the cables are good, I have another power supply which I tried (and motherboard) and the cpu made that board beep with the bad ram error (I don't have ram for that one, so none was installed, hence the beep/cpu is good). All of my power cables are heavy duty and I haven't had any problems until this time. I checked the voltages on the drive connectors and I get 5.14 and 12.12 on them, so that's fine. As far as I know, Seagate's tools can't analyze a drive that shows no signs of life. The bios doesn't see the drive either, so I didn't think of trying their tools. I guess I could look into it though. Yeah, no clean room here, unfortunately. :) Do you know of a recovery place that might charge less than $700 for a 40 gig drive? I've never had any static problems. I always leave the power supply plugged in, but powered off and ground myself to the metal chasis of it. This wasn't an instant thing, it happened over the course of a couple of hours with the hard drive and the motherboard the following morning, after a few more hours of use. it's very odd.. i have surge supressors but no UPS. Cable modem via a hub in this room and a router in the other room, everything else electronic in the apartment is running fine, so I don't think it was a power related problem.. Any other ideas? :) Anyone else? please? :)

http://www.gillware.com/ Goto google.com and search for HArd disk Recovery / Repair, and you will find a list of competeing buyers listed on right and down the list Gillware offers repairs around $400 for windows based and about $600 for non windows users, they burn replacement data onto DVDs and other mediums. You best bet is to get the data reproduced into DVD sets, and then buy new hard disk. This method should be cheaper than having the drive repaired, and anyways a repaired drive doesnt repair other older parts other than motors, usually like drive read write heads have wear and tear too, however Raid configurations are much more expensive than most, and that 700 dollar one may still be cheapest yet, You will have to spend some time emailing these companies asking them about your drive. :) Wish I could of been of more help. Or the drastic approach buy a repair manual for drives, and learn how to perform repairs, which takes time. Good luck in either case :) Have any more questions I will try to help you out. Sincerely, Joe Christian

Thanks again Joe. I'll check out Gillware.. I don't have a RAID configuration, so I'm on the low end of things. Just single NTFS partition. I've heard everything from $500 to $3800 from 3 places I've called.. $378 plus $4.99 per dvd.. That's not bad at all! :) I'll give them a call now.. It's www.gillware.com btw.. Thanks again Joe, you've saved me several hundred dollars :) -Eric

No, Problem.. Glad I could help... Sincerely, Joe Christian