This probably all sounds a bit Heath-Robinson to most of you, but maybe someone has some clues…
I've an 18GB SCSI Seagate Barracuda ST318416N. It is dead. The symptoms of its ‘deadness’ seem to be that it is not spinning up the disks - though there are activity lights flashing from time to time on the controller card, and the system does recognise the drive being connected (actually, booted into OS9 SCSI Probe sees the drive, but cannot mount anything, OSX has a kernel panic on boot).
I put a test meter on the contacts that appear to put power into the drive’s disk spinning motor, but there’s no indication of power there. My guess is that the controller board is somehow fried, but the platters/motor are ok.
Is it feasible to find an identical disk and swap the controller boards?
Or, in a worst case, swap the platters from the dead drive into a working drive - of the same type?
(I suppose this is how they do data recovery on dead drives!?)
The data on the drive is of little value, so it's not worth paying for recovery. At the moment it's more of a personal challenge to see if I can get it going again. So far the vultures are quoting GBP:150.00 (approx USD:300) for an identical drive - which really isn't worth it to me.
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