Lucky save, HDD with shorted SATA connector - LFC#223

[Music] hello interwebs welcome to let's fix computers i've got a click-free automatic backup hard drive here so this is just a bug standard usb 2 external hard drive it just came with some backup software so they've branded it and this thing is not working this came in came in the other day and i've been looking at it today now full disclosure i already know what is wrong with this driver i've already been looking at it um however i got like halfway through repairing this thing and then i was like this is really interesting actually i'm going to reverse everything i've done put it back together again and then record the process so hopefully some people can learn from this so um this is this video is not going to be um any kind of masterclass on how to recover data or how to fix a broken hard drive because that's very circumstantial and this is actually what i think i think actually think this is going to be a very niche instance but it is the second time i've seen this type of failure which means it's obviously common enough that i think it's worth making a video about it so let's get started as i say customer came in with this it wasn't powering on so it's stone dead they thought that their uh power adapter was no good so and the power adapter they had for it was some third-party replacement one that weighed less than a couple of coins in my pocket so obviously not a good start either however i plugged in my power supply and that didn't work either so i thought okay well it must be a bad enclosure then right so the first thing i did was i put my multimeter across the dc jack and i'll show you that here so i put my multimeter into continuity mode so beeps and i put black probe on the side pin on the negative pin and then red probe on this positive center pin and as you can hear we're shorted to ground on the dc jack so that's why this thing doesn't power up because the dc jack is dead short to ground so uh that is a really poor start so you obviously i thought okay well the enclosure's bust right anyone who's in this business knows that these enclosures do die now and then no big deal you rip it apart you take the hard drive out you put it in a new enclosure that you bought on amazon for 10 quid or 10 no problem jobs are good so let's take it apart i've already taken this apart as you can hear and inside we've got just a bog standard western digital 500 gigabyte hard drive so far so good now here's where the problems start if i now measure the dc jack on this again with the hard drive removed i bet you can guess what's going to happen absolutely nothing it's no longer shorted with the hard drive removed so that means the hard drive itself is shorted now on the back of the hard drive on the sata connector we've got 12 0 5 0 and 3.3 and there's uh i think there's three pins per uh wire so we've got three pins of 12 as you can see there then there's three pins of zero three pins of five three pins of zero again and then three pins of 3.3 volts which i think is not used on a hard drive so what we'll do now is the three 12 volt pins and then three zero volt pins those the ones we're interested so i'll stick my probe onto the zero volt pins and as you can hear we shorted out on the actual power pins of the hard drive so at that point i was like welp that's the end of this hard drive then and that's what got me to thinking now i have before i have before had a customer who came in with a hard drive where they said they'd had smoke from the hard drive they'd taken the board off and found a uh a blackened component on that which turned out to be a diode i removed that diode for them and the hard drive lived so that got me thinking fine let's have a look at this one let's just try so hard drive out and i'm gonna remove this board from it so here's our controller board so the guide that i wanted to check on is the um over voltage protection diode here in the top corner now these guys are commonly seen on laptops as well i've got videos where i've found problem diodes on laptops what this guy is it's a zener diode and it's wired in reverse across the power input so it's re it's wired backwards across 12 volts and ground and it serves two purposes there firstly if the drive is connected in reverse polarity but for some whatever reason then the diode will conduct and it will short the power supply out preventing 12 volts from going onto the ground rail so it shorts out the power supply but protects the circuit board then the other reason for it the more useful reason is that the diode is a zener diode which means it has a very low breakdown voltage in this case it's probably about 20 volts on this thing which means if the 12 volt rail is running really hot and goes over 20 volts then the diode will begin to conduct backwards shorting that 20 volts down to ground and it will clamp it and i've seen these diodes fail on laptops and one of the this hard drive that i mentioned that came from the customer the diode had blown up on it so what i thought in this one i was like well sure let's take the diode off just in case it's failed and once again i can show you this in action multimeter into continuity mode and if i check both sides of this [Laughter] as you can see it's in a dead short circuit in both directions so once again we can see our short circuit there another thing to keep in mind as well is that this thing is being powered from a 2 amp 12 volt power supply now the last hard drive i'd seen that had blown up that was actually in a computer so remember if this hard drive been in a computer with a 800 watt power supply in it then that shorted diode is going to dump whatever your 12 volt rail will supply into the diode so that would have been the difference between this one just going dead short and not working or if i plugged this into a pc that would have gone nuclear so what i'll do now is i'll warm up my soldering iron and remove it so if you've got a hot air station you can hot air off the board if you want at the risk of damaging the connector which you may or may not care about however if you've got a soldier in line you can do a method that i call the stepping technique to remove this smd diode so what i'm going to do is now i strongly recommend wetting both sides of it with some solder i'll do this again just to show that so i'll just put a bit of solder on each side of it just so that solder join has been flowed there we go so both sides of it have been heated to melt point and now i'm going to heat both sides of it again and again until it comes off the board so i'm going to start going i'm going to go heat heat and then grab it with the tweezers and just go back and forth from one side to the other while trying to lift it away with the tweezers ah damn it okay what i'll do i'm just gonna try and push it to one side instead there we go and i've just managed to walk that guy off of the board not a very elegant way of doing it but it means you can do it without hot air and it also means that we didn't damage any of the surrounding area either of course if you've got hot tweezers hot tweezers would be a really good way of doing this as well i hear there's a new pair of hot tweezers on the market made by mini which look pretty good i might be buying some of those myself anyway um so now we've removed that diode so firstly let's check the diode multimeter in continuity mode now obviously being a diode it should conduct in one direction but not the other short and short so this diode is shorted in both directions so we've confirmed that this diode has failed and now if we bring the board back in if i just go across these pads remember we checked this earlier we're no longer short-circuited so we've now resolved the short circuit on this controller board so let's reassemble the hard drive and see if it powers up and as a final check i'll just do that same continuity check on the sata connector that i did before just to prove a point as you can see we're no longer shorted on the 12 volt line anymore banging so now we've got a hard drive that's ready to plug into a dock and we can attempt to recover the data from it right so i've got my recovery laptop here please ignore the giant bar down the center of the screen this laptop is not designed for general use okay and power on so we've got power to our dock and the hard drive has spun up so i can feel the drive spinning good start good start right so the driver spun up and is now detected by the computer however it's apparently uninitialized so we're almost there we've got the drive detected but the disk you've inserted is not readable by this computer and if you try and plug this into windows you'll get something very similar the drive will not be visible in this pc and if you go to disk management then it will just show as an uninitialized disk or just raw data so in order to get around this i'm going to use test disk by cg security which is used which can be used to recover lost partitions so let's just go into the screen now so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to load up a terminal command now although i'm working on a mac here you can do exactly the same thing with a windows computer testdisk is multi-platform and it works it's it works in exactly the same way whether you're on mac or windows or linux so what we're doing here is pretty much the same um i'm lo i'm working on a mac which is functionally identical to linux for the purposes of this video um however if you're on windows you just need to download testdisk and just run the testdisk.exe file i need to launch from bash here so i'm just going to cd over to my testdisk folder and run test disk and that gets us to here so i'm not going to make any log files for this don't log right and as you can see we've got our disk available so i'm just going to go in with uh dev disk 2 500 gigabyte hard drive select now we need to we need to know what kind of partition data we're looking for so the two that we're most likely to have are either just intel pc partition or an efi gpt partitions that's like that's master boot record or gpt now if you're if the disk is like a windows drive uh that you've been booting from with windows 10 or something like that you're almost certainly on gpt by now however a lot of external disks are probably still master boot record so i'm going to guess that this one is master boot record and select intel pc and so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to analyze the drive to look for lost partitions so enter again and i'm going to just do the quick search so quick search enter again as you can see we're finding stuff so this drive it appears is probably not actually failing it's just scrambled where it had a bad day so it's found a lost ntfs partition here and as you can see the start is you know at the start of the disk and the end point is at the end of the disk that looks great we've also got the um the the volume name as well click free storage there's also some other system stuff as well so this all looks promising so i'm going to say enter to continue and what i'm going to do now i'm going to write that partition structure back to the disk so we're going to write those partitions back onto the disk and theoretically because we will have written the partition structure onto the disk all of the data that is stored on the disk should now become readable again so right yes i definitely want to write it okay so now what we need to do is either um if we were connected internally we need to reboot but what i can do i can just disconnect and reconnect the drive again so i'm going to quit out of test disk and i'm going to ignore that and already we've now mounted the drive it's asking me if i want a time machine to it i don't want a time machine to it however now we now have access to the data on the drive so we're now ready to copy data so again if your drive has got bad sectors and stuff like that you may not have had quite a smoother process as i just had however as you can see we had a drive that appeared to be totally dead and a laboratory job um when i first saw that short circuit on the drive i was i i was convinced i was like no i'm done that's got to go off to a data recovery specialist which i am not however as i say with just a little bit of poking around we actually found a very simple solution and then using test disk we can restore the lost partitions to get the drive readable again and that's how we've now just apparently completely recovered this drive the chances are i could put that back into the enclosure again and it would work however given what we've just done with the enclosure and the hard drive i would definitely not reuse this it probably still works it might even pass diagnostics however hard drives are cheap don't mess about just replace it so i'm going to go ahead and try and recover the data now and just for posterity i just plugged it into my windows workstation just to check if i could actually run the click free software and i found with hidden items showed on what it's actually doing is hiding the cut the actual backups in a hidden folder so if i go into s s s s s click free backup number one c and here is our customer data so as i say software issue this click free software is obviously a bit weird but the data is ready for recovery so that's everything uh thank you very much for watching everyone bit of a niche repair but hopefully just gives you guys some ideas that when you're faced with something that is stone dead might just be worth getting your multimeter out just in case you get lucky like i did here i think that's a lucky fix however by having the uh just by having a bit of knowledge on something that you could check for it might save your life uh stick around for the end card all of my support links and discord server and stuff are there and thank you very much i'll see you in the next video bye for now you

Channel: Adamant IT

Views: 135,148

Keywords: adamant it, adamantit, computer, repair, shop, custom, gaming, modding

Id: qdXW-DUSsh8

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 12 2020