Hi,
a few days ago I unmounted a WD Caviar Blue WD10EALX hard drive (produced 06 DEC 2010) which I had mounted in my PC but only accessed seldom. Yesterday I wanted to copy some data from it and plugged it to the ESATA port, however, the drive was not recognized correctly. Windows only turned up with a new generic hard drive which I could initialize (no partition was detected). I tried it with a SATA->USB adapter then, which surprisingly worked. Since copying 1 TB of data via USB takes a long amount of time, I postponed it until today.
At the momentent, the drive does not even turn up, the PCB smells like if something has been blown (the cheap PSU from the SATA->USB adapter caused an overvoltage on the board?) and it gets hot, very, very quickly. I put it in the fridge for about eight hours to cool it down, however, this hasn’t changed anything. I tried it with a better PSU, but the effect was the same.
If I send the device to WD, are they going to replace the PCB and send me the same device back? Can I replace the PCB all by myself? I’m willing to invest a maximum of 100 € and voiding the warranty is also an option. Any ideas are welcome.
P.S. I can make a hires picture of the back of the PCB, if that helps.
