If a hard drive starts smoking, making grinding noises and emitting a burning odor, generally, the culprit is the damaged printed control board (PCB). Now, in this case, what can you do? This article will guide you to deal with this situation correctly.
As we all know, it is always suggested to take good care of a hard drive in that it’s quite vulnerable due to its sensitive and moving components. Plus, due to the fact that data is stored in the drive platters, once the hard drive fails, all data will get corrupted and lost, like damaged Outlook file. Besides, among myriad reasons for hard drive failures, physical damage is the most serious one, including scattered drive platters, failed spindle motors, and crashed heads, damaged printed circuit board and so on.
All kinds of physical damages could bring up different outcomes. For instance, as the printed circuit board is burned, you will catch the hard drive smoking with a burning odor accompanied. In this situation, when can you do to rescue the hard drive and internal data? Thereinafter, we’ll delve into such a smoking hard drive and share you some suggestions.
Why Hard Drive Smokes?
First of all, you should know the real causes of hard drive smoking. Virtually, the smoke and the burning odor are from the hard drive printed circuit board. It sits on the back of the hard drive. When the hard drive works, the electricity flow will pass through the board and get into the drive, making the spindle motor spinning and the read/write heads moving. Thus, printed circuit board is pretty important. When the printed circuit board gets damaged, the increasing buildup of heat may hit the damaged parts of the circuit board, thus emitting smoke and burning odor.
What to Do in Such Case?
Under such circumstance, you should not move the hard disk drive with a burned printed circuit board to another device. Otherwise, it will damage the new device as well. In fact, you should take the following actions to get the hard drive to quit smoking.
1. Power off
First off, you should power off the device, such as the computer where the hard drive is working. Do not continue operating on this hard drive any longer. It can damage the drive further.
2. Make Drive Go Cold
After that, you should plug the malfunctioning hard drive out of the device. Then, you should make the drive go cold turkey. You can just leave it aside for a certain time.
3. Replace Printed Circuit Board
Eventually, you have to replace the burned printed circuit board. Just slapping a healthy circuit board from an existing hard drive onto the suffering drive will not make effects due to the role of ROM chip. Generally, before changing the boards, the ROM chips between the two boards have to be swapped carefully. In addition, you should ensure the new, healthy printed circuit board is compatible with the drive. As the replacing process is much more complex than what you think, you’d better resort to related hard disk repair professionals.
Author Introduction:
Shirley Zhang is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including mdf recovery and outlook repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com
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