More techniques for reviving dead hard disks: swap circuits

I thought I'd hear 'em all (my favorite is chilling a drive in the fridge), but this is new to me. I suspect drive recovery services have known this forever ...

MacInTouch: timely news and tips about the Apple Macintosh

[Ken Spencer] My daughter had a lot of photographs, some of which were not backed up, stored on a LaCie D2. She plugged it in one day, saw smoke and was out of business... when the board in the drive enclosure went, it took out the board in the Hard Drive! It was a Maxtor. In desperation, I bought an identical Maxtor, and discovered that the controller board connects to the drive with spring loaded contacts under the board. Took out 5 screws, took the old board off the Maxtor, exchanged it with the board from the new drive, and was able to recover everything! She bought a WiebeTech drive enclosure, and they were very helpful in helping her try to solve her problem.

[Robert Burke] Regarding Ken Spencer's solution to the bad hard drive logic board, I too have done this. One of the users I support had his hard drive die in a newly purchased refurb PowerMac G5 some time ago. On a hunch, I swapped the board with a like unit from another PowerMac we had. The drive worked as normal and I was able to get all his data off so he could take it in for repair. Note, though, that I'd only do this with the exact same model of hard drive, and same version of board if possible...