WD7501AALS-75J7BO Data recovery/Fix

*EDIT*

My drive no longer works but has plenty of data on it I would like to keep.What I was doing while this happend was putting in a new power supply. The power supply and driver were working fine until I did something very silly. The problem was my new power supply only had one SATA connect where my old one had four. I originally had the SATA plugged into my Drive and it was all working fine. Then realized my DVD drive did not work so I needed two. I did notice the power supply had another plugin that would fit on the drive. That plug is FDD (Which I now know stands for Floppy Disk Drive) I was testing to see if the FDD would power my Drive while I used the SATA to power my DVD drive(it did not). The FDD was still plugged into the Drive at the same time I replugged the SATA cable into the Drive…causing smoke. Foul smelling smoke.

I believe I ruined the driver by plugging in the SATA while the computer and power supply was on. Instantly the driver started smoking…I’m pretty sure the drive is done for but I was just wondering if there was a way for me to get it repaired or save my data. Thank you.

SATA drives are hot-swappable… they shouldn’t let out any magic smoke if you plug in the drive’s power connector and the SATA data cable while the PC is on.

The user fzabkar might be able to pop on and give you some pointers on trying to test/revive the drive, but I’d be much more concerned as to why the power supply caused the drive to let out the magic smoke – that’s definitely not a good sign. :dizzy_face:

Edit:

Let me alter that answer, slightly… SATA drives are hot-swappable when the controller is running in SATA mode… I believe there were/are issues if you try to hot-swap a SATA drive if the controller is in legacy/IDE mode… but that should only lead to corruption/data loss – I’ve never heard of it causing smoke… something still seems very wrong here

What I was doing while this happend was putting in a new power supply. The power supply and driver were working fine until I did something very silly. The problem was my new power supply only had one SATA connect where my old one had four. I originally had the SATA plugged into my Drive but the realized my DVD drive did not work so I needed two. I did notice the power supply had another plugin that would fit on the drive. That plug is FDD I was testing to see if the FDD would power my Drive while I used the SATA to power my DVD drive(it did not). The FDD was still plugged into the Drive at the same time I replugged the SATA cable into the Drive…causing smoke. Foul smelling smoke.

The 4-pin FDD connector has +12V and +5V pins. If you’ve plugged these into the drive’s jumper block, then you will probably have damaged the Marvell MCU (big “M”). The jumper pins connect to the MCU’s I/O port.

If this is the case, then you should look for an 8-pin serial flash memory chip at location U12. Each board stores unique, drive specific “adaptive” information, either in this chip, if it exists, or inside the MCU. The flash memory, or its contents, will need to be transferred to your replacement PCB. If location U12 is unpopulated, then you will be facing an expensive professional data recovery. :frowning:

Could we see a photo of the damage?

U12 is indeed unpopulated. There is little to no visible damage but then again I don’t exactly know what I am doing. I will upload photos of the board later on today.

Here they are!

I can’t see any damage, but I still suspect a damaged MCU.

If you have a multimeter, measure the resistances of TVS diodes D4 and D3, and zero-ohm resistors R64 and R67 near the SATA power connector.

If the above components test OK, then power up the board on its own and carefully measure the voltages at the uppermost of the three pins of transistor Q1 (bottom left corner of MCU), inductors L1 and L2 below the SMOOTH motor controller, and the left pin (anode) of diode D2. These are the test points for the DC-DC converters.