Is my hard drive fixable?

[brickvader]

Hi all I have an hitachi travelstar hdd, it's a old 2.5 IDE laptop part that I was using for storage with an adapter.

So by mistake I plugged it in while the adapter was plugged in and connected the top row of female ends with the bottom row of males ends. There is now no life from the drive.

Can any one tell me if there is a failsafe on this drive in the form of a surface mount that I can remove in order to use the drive again.

I have seen post before where drives have been resurrected by removing and bridging some thing on the pcb even tho this can only be done once I believe as the drive will die if I do the same again.

Thanks for any one who reads and helps

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hello, & Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

I don't have a picture of the front side on your Hitachi PCB, but there usually are 2 TVS (transient voltage stabilization) diodes, one for the 5v and other the 12v bus which will be sacrificed if say the 12v bus is connected to the 5v line. They become short circuited and might need to be clipped open to supply proper power.
This is an IDE drive but you didn't mention if it is connected by a USB or SATA adapter to your computer. On IDE drives the power connector is separate from the 40 pin data connector, and just reversing the data lines shouldn't short out a power diode. Does the drive spin up properly when connected to a standard separate molex 4 pin power connector? It may be the drive data became corrupted when connecting the data line with the power already on (a no/no with IDE drives). Try connecting the IDE drive to just a separate power connector to see if it has 12 volt power to spin it up OK. Then thru the adapter to see if it gets 12v and 5v. That will tell you if it is a power problem (in firmware or adapter) or data corruption. The real expert on TVS problems and repair is Fcabkar. but haven't seen a post from him since April 21st.