[Ferrara]

Hope you can help us find a way to resurrect a drive that went belly up today.

One of my co-workers unpacked a new Mini and set it beside her OS9 machine, a Mac 9600 that was booting from an IDE drive on a controller card.

While the Mini was up and working okay, she apparently tried to plug the firewire out from the firewire card in the 9600 into the Mini's FW connector. She said she smelled something burning and shut down the 9600. The Mini was unaffected.

When she tried to boot the 9600 as normal, it would not come up. I looked at the drive and saw that it was not spinning up. Later I put it in a firewire case and tried it. Still didn't spin up.

It's a Western Digital 120GB Caviar, and I have an identical drive which was purchased at the same time. I DO NOT KNOW if the firmware is the same because I can't tell where to find a mention of the firmware on the drive.

The two logic boards are not exactly the same, one made in Korea and one in Taiwan. One of the screws does not match up. Even so I tried to swap the board from the good drive to the bad drive. It did spin up after that, but now it gives a perpetual clicking/clanking sound and does not mount.

Any ideas on what to do from here? Is there a way to flash to good drive was the bad drive's firmware if they are indeed different? I have a PC available for that if it's possible. I don't care about losing the good drive as it's not being used for anything.

The lady who works on this computer is upset that she didn't backup for the last week and she has a project due in a few days. She can restore from her last backup but will lose a week and blow her deadline. It would be great if I could get this thing up just long enough to drag off the data.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

[Ferrara]

Last piece of evidence.

I saw a small burn mark in the foam where the logic board rests. I traced that back to a spot on the board which is one of the raised component areas, and there are five on the logic board. Have no idea what they are. If you see the largest of these five, a square, the burned piece is the farthest one away from it, in the upper right-hand corner if looking away from the back where the ribbon cable and power supply are hooked up. Hope this makes sense.

In any case, there is a mark that I scraped off with a finger nail, and it was slightly charred.

I'm not sure this was all that happened to the logic board, but this one area, at least, suffered damage as a result of whatever took place.

[tooki]

Whatever happened to the drive, it's exceedingly unlikely that you could fix it -- and far MORE likely that you could cause more damage that could make recovery impossible.

I'd find out how much work (in dollars) re-creating that job will represent. If the cost is more than about $2000, I'd call DriveSavers and have the data recovered, which should cost $1000 at the absolute minimum. But if that's cheaper than re-creating the work, it'll still be the best option.

If not, junk the drive, and call it a hard lesson on why you should back up daily!

tooki