Yes if it were a power surge the circuit board is probably
what was damaged, but why bother? Unless there was valuable
data loss and yet, no funds to pay for a professional
recovery center, you'd have to have a working drive to know
the board is good and then might as well just use the other
drive - and send in the original for warranty replacement if
under warranty still.
First off this drive that went bad had no data on it I care about
recovering. Second it was a vintage 1999 6.5 GB Hitachi brand. Third
the incident happened to a laptop that had a dead main battery I
inadvertently unplugged the transformer brick during startup. Also I
never had a problem with this HD before and it did not sound that it
may be heading for a breakdown.
The bios reported that it could see the drive and had all correct as
far as its specs but after trying numerous things like FDISK and a
reformat plus trying to write zeros to the drive all commands were
refused. I am not that DOS savvy but with help and answers from a PC
news group I tried numerous command strings. NOTHING WORKED THERE WAS
NO WAY TO ACCESS THE DRIVE. There was a suggestion to get an adapter
and put it in one of my desktop Pcs but that was more work than I
cared to do.
The error replies came via the computer's rom or windows floppy and or
install CD plus Hitachi's drive utility. I got a bunch of different
errors, IDE error, no FAT or Fat32 partition found, etc. Hitachi's
drive fitness test utility did give me an error code number, which I
relayed to Hitachi's tech department below, was their answer to two
emails I wrote them:
If the hard drive was in the process of booting up and the power was
cut it
could have caused issues with the hard drive with the read/write head.
It
could have also cause a power corruption error. Unfortunately those
hard
drives are out of warranty and we do not have way to replace that hard
drive. If Drive Fitness Test has come back with the 0x75 error there
isn't
much more that can happen with that hard drive.
I am sorry but the 0x75 error is a mechanical failure and there are
parts
inside of the hard drive that are not functioning. There isn't a way
to
repair the hard drive and we are unable to repair the hard drive as
well.
The 0x75 error doesn't specify what mechanical part has failed but it
is
hard to say that a IDE controller issue will cause a problem with a
hard
drive. I am sorry that we cannot help with fixing your hard drive but
with
that error the hard drive is beyond repair of any kind.
The only reason I asked this group the question is like you seem to be
thinking from most of the reply above is what I thought. NO WAY A
POWERING OFF COULD PHYICALLY RUIN THE HARD DRIVE INSIDE. Now
scrambling the OS code or maybe the for lake of a better word the HD's
table of contents maybe. But I assumed scandisk or a reformat plus re-
partitioning would clean things up for a reinstall of the system
(windows 98SE)
So my question to this group or maybe an insight to it is has anyone
encountered this or watch out not to do what I did. I have been using
computers both Mac and PC for years and years. I have seen and heard
some strange things but this was a new one for me. I really don't
think Hitachi was trying to sell me a new drive or passing the buck
which I think we all know goes on in the computer world with software
companies blaming hardware and vise versa. Sending a person off in a
circle to try and get an answer of fix to a problem.
