It sounds like you fried your drive’s circuit board. The only poster here who really has any understanding of these boards is fzabkar checkout his post or PM him for help. It might take him a bit of time to get back to you. He has helped quite a few who have done the same.
Your adapter should have been OK, provided that it was a regulated type of the correct polarity.
That said, if your drive doesn’t spin up after connecting it to your computer’s motherboard, or if it takes out your computer’s power supply, then the HDD PCB is most probably faulty. If this is the case, could you upload a photo of the component side of the board?
Alternatively, if the drive spins up when attached to the computer but not when installed in its enclosure, then you will need to fix the USB-SATA bridge board, or replace it with one from an identical external drive of the same capacity. I’m assuming that the bridge board has an Initio INIC-1607E bridge IC, in which case the data will be hardware encrypted, even if you have not set a password. You can confirm whether the data are encrypted by examining sectors 0 and 1 with a disc editor while the drive is directly attached to your motherboard. Let us know if you get to this stage.
Your adapter should have been OK, provided that it was a regulated type of the correct polarity. > I do not know if it was !! > That said, if your drive doesn’t spin up after connecting it to your computer’s motherboard, or if it takes out your computer’s power supply, then the HDD PCB is most probably faulty. If this is the case, could you upload a photo of the component side of the board? > Yes, the drive doesn’t spin up after connecting it to my motherboard. It didn’t take out my computer’s power supply though … I am attaching a couple of high-res pictures. > http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113967/IMG_0798.JPG> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113967/IMG_0799.JPG> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113967/IMG_0800.JPG> Also, I did a little more searching around the web, and man fzabkar does your name pop up everywhere ! WD community, Seagate community, hddguru … !! You are the man! Anyways, I saw a lot of suggestions you have posted about burnt out D4 diodes … I am not really sure if that’s the case in my situation here, but I am linking to a picture that shows D4 and R64 clearly. I even tried testing R64 with a digital multimeter, but I guess I am doing that wrong since it just shows 0 (and all the other components that are marked Rxx show 0 too)> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/113967/IMG_0802.JPG> And thanks a ton … if everything works, if I get back the contents of this hard disk, the first thing I am doing is taking a back up and the second thing, coming to wherever you are and getting you a cup of coffee ! > Alternatively, if the drive spins up when attached to the computer but not when installed in its enclosure, … Let us know if you get to this stage. > Nope, I don’t think I have gotten there yet. I am pretty sure the drive itself is not faulty, it was working just about perfectly (healthy status reported by the operating system, decently fast access speeds, no weird noises etc)
You should measure D4, D3, R64, and R67. Since you are testing for short circuits, you can use the 200 ohms range of your multimeter.
All resistance checks must be done without power applied to the circuit under test. This is because the meter injects its own tiny current into the device.
Connect the black lead to the COMmon terminal of the meter, and the red lead to the Volt/Ohm terminal. Select the 200 ohms range. Now connect the probes to the soldered ends of the device under test.
A resistance of 0 ohms indicates a short circuited device.
If the meter displays OL or 1 (not 1.0), then this indicates that the meter has overranged on that scale.
R67 and R64 should test as close as possible to 0.0 ohms. D4 and D3 should test high.
D4 looks discoloured in your first photo. You should also test its resistance on the diode test range of your meter. Reverse the probe leads and test it in both directions.
