Lucky save, HDD with shorted SATA connector - LFC

This started out as an assumed lost-cause hard drive, but just as I was literally on the phone to the customer to say 'sorry your data has gone unless you want to send it to a lab' I remembered That One Time I Saw A HDD With A Dead Protection Diode and figured I'd try my luck.
TestDisk - www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
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[@Adamant_IT]

Regarding the Tweezers I mention in this video, I was mistaken - they're LCR tweezers, not hot tweezers. So not actually useful for this job.

[@nilsblibalbalba6948]

Adamant IT yes you can see them in action @electronicsrepairschool

[@guytech7310]

A better option to remove smt components is with a hot-air rework station. Basically it produces a small stream of hot air to melt the solder so you can remove it. Alternative you can use solder wick (braided copper) to remove solder from the PCB and component so it can be removed. That said the hot-air station is the preferred tool to rework PCB boards.

[@jafinch78]

I've seen there are ~$15 solder iron tweezers online now on eBay and I assume Aliexpress. I ordered two additional SH72's with some J style tips and printed a holder on a local fab lab 3D printer to make portable tweezers. Haven't gotten around to assembling yet, since don't have the need. I'm still working on outdoors projects. Am planning to either use PlastiDip or Type 2 silicone coating on the 3D printed part also to seal and provide a little better grip. Thanks for sharing... makes me want to check my bin of HD's to see what might still have some life left.

[@runehansen278]

Hey adamant IT. Quick question, if I have a 1080ti where 1 fan might be shorted, and the card only shows black screen when booting, what options do I have? Have disconnected all fans, but it wont boot. Is there something I could swap out or check with a meter?

[@guytech7310]

@@runehansen278 If the fans have three wires (speed feedback), its possible the card will not run with the fans disconnected. One option is to try running the fans (12VDC or 5VDC depending on fan voltage) to see if they work. Also check the fan power pins to see if the card is supplying power to the fans.

[@MrCalifornium]

Massive thank you for this guide! I found myself in a similar situation with my backup drive failing to spin and a short on the 12v line. Informed by your content, I ventured to remove the diode, and to my delight, the diode was shorted out of the circuit and... I'm now successfully recovering my data! As someone with minimal experience in electronics, particularly with circuit boards and soldering, I was initially apprehensive. However, your clear explanations and practical tips made the process not only achievable but genuinely enjoyable. Channels like yours are a treasure trove for novices like myself, empowering us to tackle technical challenges with confidence and enthusiasm. Your work is not only educational but truly life-saving regarding data recovery. Keep up the fantastic work - you're making a significant impact!

[@AccidentalMisfire09]

I'm so thankful that you decided to make and upload this video! While I did not have issues with a dying diode, I DID have a drive that dumped it's partition table mid-backup. I lost ~8 years of music collection from various audio outlets, some of which are now defunct. CGSecurity's software managed to find the partition table, re-write it, and allowed me to recover all of my music again! I've only been subscribed for a short while, and you've definitely piqued my interest with these oddball repairs. Thank you so much!

[@wowenkho]

Thank you. I watch your channel from time to time and I was lucky that you tackled Testdisk because I kinda needed someone to show me how to use it to recover a corrupt microSD card with video files in it. Thanks to your quick guide, I recovered those important clips and even past/erased ones.

[@1myfriendjohn]

Hi Adam, Great video! Just watching you solder and un-solder things has helped me massively as I was really weak with my soldering skills.

[@Adamant_IT]

Glad to hear! I'm no soldering master by any means, but if I'm giving people the courage to have a go and practise for themselves, then mission accomplished!

[@danarepouille1381]

@Adamant_IT Thank you, Graham! I received a laptop yesterday, which would not POST when the SATA 1TB Seagate HDD was connected. I removed the HDD, removed the PCB from the HDD, and checked for shorts. The 5V rail was shorted all over the PCB. I injected voltage, starting with 1V and 1A, increasing to 3V and 1A. The diode got hot, which caused me to remember YOUR video! I removed the diode, and the HDD worked perfectly after I reassembled it and connected it to the SATA port. Since I have no use for this HDD, I did this purely as an experiment and for my training experience. Thanks ever so much for planting THIS video into my brain for future use, two years later.

[@TheMoeP]

Great video, first time I hear about testdisk, definitely will use it for further disk restorations 👌👌

[@zhuzzir]

Thank you. I m seasons electronic with not much hand-on experience but your place is the place I go lately for pointers and helpful guides. Been following for a while n today u gained another subscriber. Luv n thanks all the way from Malaysia of South East Asia ❤️🇲🇾

[@Umski]

I had a TVS diode go on a WD from my parents' PVR which had a PSU pumping out too many volts on the 5V rail - luckily this meant I could recover the recordings - I went down the road of replacing the entire board and swapped out the BIOS chip which matches the drive. Deep diving into it I learnt that the two TVS diodes for 5V and 12V work in conjunction with R64 and R67 (0 Ohms) so that the current shunts down to ground via the diodes and either blows the diode and/or the resistor to prevent damage to components further downstream - very sensible design IMO. Like you say - get the data off ASAP! Nice tip on using testdisk for MBR recovery :)

[@nahventure3873]

hi Adam! glad you decided to undo everything just to show us!

[@comicsanz97]

His name is Graham :)))

[@reggiedixon2]

@@comicsanz97 I thought he was actually Adam Ant 1980s pop star which is why he looks like a highwayman.

[@markanderson2904]

@@reggiedixon2 adamant (adj): unshakable or insistent especially in maintaining a position or opinion : unyielding

[@reggiedixon2]

@@markanderson2904 Thanks I think, English is my first language so I am well aware what adamant means and I quote: "Stand and deliver, your money or your life"

[@vitor900000]

4:45 You could have also talked about rust accumulation over time here. Right above you left hand finder are the contacts pads that connect the board with the HDD head. Overtime those pads can develop a layer of rust (Your HDD already have some. Its that yellow discoloration) and this can cause the HDD to have a lot of R/W errors. This can make a HDD look like it has bad sectors or is dyeing but in reality its just a bad connection between the Head and the Board. Cleaning it can bring the HDD back to fully function. Saved 2 Seagate 2TB HDDs by cleaning it.

[@vitor900000]

@Mr Guru There are many types of rust. Its defensively rust just not the usual green/blue rust that you usually see from water damage.

[@duroxkilo]

very interesting.. it's also visible around the 3 screw holes @4:41.. what causes oxidation to occur gradually like that?

[@vitor900000]

@@duroxkilo As far as I know the type of rust that aren't chemical are related to heat, humidity, and oxygen concentration and the type of metal. Also the flow of electricity can accelerate the process. Oxidation will happen overtime to all metals. Some are more resistant than others. Aluminium for example is very resistant to oxidation because it rapidly form a thin aluminium oxide layer that impedes the metal from entering in contact with oxygen. For those kind of applications the best metal to use is Gold. That is why Memory and CPU terminals are usually Gold plated. Gold is very resistant to oxidation and a excellent conductor but its also expensive. Idk what metal they are using to plate those terminals but due to their color its definitely not gold.

[@MrNicoe36cabrio]

Wow, that's a nice fix! And the channel is going strong. Dutch regards, Nico

[@sebmaziu9677]

Great vid as always! And nice Reimu background ;)

[@train4905]

Absolutely brilliant graham,thankyou for Posting,i really enjoyed this,thankyou

[@chuxxsss]

Hi Adam, when you test that zones one leg needs to be off the board to check it. Great show mate. Very informative.

[@metrotechguru5863]

Graham, you rock! Your vids are so educational. I appreciate that you take PC hardware troubleshooting to the next level from where most people would be comfortable. I'm sure that you are inspiring many people to attempt repairs that they might otherwise give up on. I hate to see technology go into the trash for want of a minor repair

[@Deraco1]

Thats pretty cool. Never hear of TestDisk before. I'll definitely have to play with this one!

[@ghislainriou9560]

Fantastic work thank you again graham god bless you always and stay safe.

[@NDJInit]

Thank you very very much. WD 4TB Black saved thanks to your tutorial. Very simple fix. Have been looking everywhere for the correct replacement diode. As shown above, removing this works just fine :)

[@keithmiller9665]

Testdisk sounds useful. Thank You!

[@RobSchofield]

Good analysis, I learned a lot! Thanks.

[@rongray8934]

Great video. Thanks for taking the time for us laymen.

[@Allen-R]

THANKS FOR THIS! After watching yours and HDD Recovery Services' video (and a some more googling since I had a different pcb layout) I got my 4TB drive working again!!!! (I gotta order a 12v TVS & fuse tho) THANK YOU FOR THIS VIDEO!

[@chrisrichardson1600]

Had a power surge and blew three hard drives so was looking at this regarding for ideas. While watching I also got the answer to why my 8tb IronWolf would only let me format half of it, MBR, changed it to GPT and bam let me have the full drive. Thank you! Liked and subbed!

[@KevinDC5]

LifeSaver!! Thanks for pointing this pesky little diode out for me! I could smell his magic soul release even though i took caution and used a 9v supply because I couldnt find my original WD 12v psu. Im up and running now with a dedicated sata/usb converter kit on piggy back. But I found this video from a link in the comments of a dissasembly vid and it turned out to pay off BIG TIME!!!! My rather ancient TB is a TB nonetheless, of basically my entire digital life memory! THANKS from Texas! Cheers!

[@wreckless_-jl6uu]

I really like watching your videos!!! :)

[@iXmerof]

One thing that might help you, instead of rebooting/replugging the disk to have the new partition scheme read, you might just use a 'partprobe' command which forces kernel to read the partition scheme from the disk again, eg. 'partprobe /dev/sdaX'

[@OresteParlatano]

Thanks for this video, it has been helpful.

[@markmurphy9280]

Awesome info, Great video, Thanks.

[@Cal-TwentyNine]

Just subscribed, great videos learning a lot :)

[@suitoha9336]

Thank you so much for the video!!! Subbed!

[@keyfir652]

Thanks for your video. It has helped me. I did what you did and now I am happy and my harddrive is working. One more time Thanks.

[@mohsinhanif4793]

Most importante is you made this job with simple tools that anyone can atleast copy or rapair at home with simple soldering iron.... this is one of best how to do chanel.

[@dekeonus]

Just a heads up (to viewers and author alike), @14:01 DO NOT write to the actual disk! That is very bad practice: If there are deeper faults with the drive you may make the drive forever unrecoverable. The customer will be less than happy if any future attempts to recover data (by say a specialist lab/company) are thwarted by your inadvisable write to the failing drive. What you actually want to do: perform a sector by sector copy to a doner hdd or image file. Testdisk will also work against an image file (the linux and windows versions have been used this way by this commentor)

[@masterknavish]

I enjoy this kind of videos which are more down to earth than some other it repairing computer videos, where everything has to be top of the line with super expensive graphics cards and water liquid cooling otherwise is just utterly garbage.

[@hearnia2k]

Interesting video. I have some old drives I have not used in a while, and I recently plugged them into a caddy, and they kept cutting the power to the caddy, I guess some short circuit protection. In another caddy I started to smell burning, and saw smoke after a few seconds. Both caddyies had decent power adaptors, and work with other drives. In fact, one was a brand new WD caddy I had after removing it's original drive. Of the 4 drives I tried 2 of them, with the same behaviour, and not wanting to mess up the caddies I stopped. I just checked, and the first 2 are shorting the right side sata pin onto pin 4 and 6 (not 5). I see the same thing on both drives. On drive 4 I think it's the same, and drive 3 seems OK, pin 1 not shorting to 4 and 6. I found a component, KVP 47A, and it seems to act like a diode, on drive 3, but not 1,2 and 4. I stumbled across your video by pure chance, in my KZbin recommendations, watched it casually, and when I saw, took a look at my drives. I might remove the KVP 47A component on one of the drives, just for kicks, since these are ancient 250GB SATA Maxtor drives I don't care about anyway, ideally I'd like to securely erase any remaining data prior to disposal, or letting someone else find a use for them.

[@HannahFortalezza]

When you were going through the folders "s.....s....s....s.....s" I was thinking 'oh no, it's porn isn't it?'

[@reggiedixon2]

I was asked to look at one of these contraptions for someone and the directory structure was exactly the same - baffling. I understand that they are designed to be used by clueless people but there is no need to make things deliberately obscure.

[@nicoghini]

Epic moment!

[@noufiyamol7615]

i loved 🥰 your explanations. and very helpful.

[@UniversalBeetle]

Yeah It worked for me. Thanks for your great explanation. After i watched your video, i did all what you showed and my HDD is back now.

[@bmendonca2]

Thank you so much! Removed diode and the drive works!!!

[@andrewallan6802]

Thank you so much for this video. I've just removed a diode from the PCB of a Samsung HDD (it shattered when I gripped it with the tweezers) and am now, hopefully, recovering the data :)

[@StampleyTech]

I removed the diode on an old 80gb drive today and was able to remove the data. Thanks a bunch for sharing!

[@CSCITEK]

This exact solution saved me something from 400-1000 dollars. Brilliant solution. And it worked. Thank you so much.

[@GreentipsCo]

Thank you, after pluging in a cheap molex to sata power the wrong way and shorting the drive, thought it was toast. A waste of 4 hrs on a Saturday morning, but i got the data back.

[@baburadhakrishnan7432]

Nice sir....Iam preparing ready for my hd recovery....Tq...

[@StriderAngel496]

wow...very useful to know this, never would have though. Thanks for the video xD

[@mangustaro1916]

Thank you so much, just saved a 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD with your help :D

[@Cookefan59]

Good trouble shooting. Many times a a multi-meter is all that you need along with focused rational thinking. Reminds me of my days on a test bench in the Marines working on power supplies. Diodes are usually part of power supply problems ie, not turning on. You might want to get yourself a nice table mount vice grip to hold the things in place while soldering. Also, I would wick away that extra solder on the board before reinstalling. It can cause other problems.

[@Lamster66]

Very helpful I had a PSU issue and ended up with a smelly smoking HDD I bought an Identicle drive and swapped the boards after also swapping the bios chip and my drive was recognised but unreadable. I assumed it was a FW issue so swapped everything back over and ordered a board to try to reflash. After watching your video I decided to check the diodes and mine were also shorted ( which had I'd have realised they were zenners I'd have checked them before tearing another drive to pieces). Anyway took the zenner out and am getting recognised drive with no partitions asking to be formatted. I've just downloaded test disk ( free) good call and I'm just about to see if I can get my data back thanks

[@wuwei1846]

That is Hughely useful to me. I thank you in kind!!

[@atmospheric5000]

Thanks a lot !! I was also facing the same problem, and solved it removing this diode too ! Lucky like you :))

[@peekpt]

I think it's a TVS diode which it's commonly used on power rails to protect from static and OV

[@oswith972]

I've seen zener diodes being used as voltage regulators before, particularly on a Commodore 64 for powering the cassette drive motors. The rail put out somewhere between 10-12V I believe but the tape drive needed something like 7 or 8 volts, can't remember as it was years ago but that's what the zener was rated at and since it starts conducting at that voltage it clamped the voltage down to the needed amount because everything "excess" got shorted to ground basically. Very effective however if it fails open circuit it unleashes the non regulated voltage to the motors, thankfully it survived when I accidentally did that. It was shorted initially which is why the tape drive wasn't spinning

[@andersmmvfc.8376]

Thank you awsome video!

[@TheTAMALESE]

How. Proud of you my man

[@KrissBartlett]

thank you for that very help fall

[@peterbrown6224]

A very good warning about swapping out an enclosed drive into a desktop thinking that the enclosure is broken.

[@train4905]

Fantastic sir , exellent

[@welshtony1]

Great fix fair play. Well done

[@omegamark4155]

Big thumbs up, thanks.

[@stephanc7192]

You make great videos

[@nilomyki]

Didn't quite catch what you said @ 8:59, but if it was Hot Tweezers by Mini (as in Miniware) they aren't Hot Tweezers but Tweezed Digital Multimeter.

[@kostasdimis276]

Excellent video! English is not my native language (i'm greek), but with this clear pronunciation and analytic speech, i understood everything. Thank you.

[@bobbymak6964]

Learned alot. Thanks.

[@karuppanllc9675]

Iam lucky to see this great video thanks

[@eri_joh_blk]

Nice, I had fix the same problem 6 years ago.. Nice video

[@scorpian78]

This is awesome!

[@Kosmonooit]

I would have plugged it into my bench pc :o lesson learnt.

[@JohnprestonGC1]

What a neat find! Saved the customer a lot of money too! Also, loving that Reimu wallpaper at the end. I get giddy when I see people representing Touhou these days.

[@Adamant_IT]

👌I'm not super into the games or lore, but there's a lot of incredible art from the Touhou fandom

[@JohnprestonGC1]

@@Adamant_IT I am in the exact same boat, the art is amazing! Some of the music remixes are good too!

[@mattparker9726]

Hi Adamant. Love your content, I have a suggestion, I am trying to follow in your footsteps, however all my knowledge is self taught, and I realize there are gaps in my knowledge, something that would help is a series of videos, just for training. Like starting from the beginning. Most of that I would know, but it's the organized and methodical pace that would help me fill in the gaps. Anyways, that might not be something you want to do, but I think it would really help as I can't find a lot of tutorials that aren't in Hindi.

[@bramvandenbroeck5060]

I had a IDE hard drive of 250gb with only 130 hours of run time on the clock, there are no bad sectors on the hard drive what so ever, but one day, i had to backup a laptop, and when i plugged that drive into its supplied adapter, there was smelly black smoke comming out of the enclosure, so i took out the drive, removed the board, and yes, a blown up diode, i replaced that diode, and now, 3 years later, this drive still works perfectly fine, with no bad sectors what so ever

[@star_man4324]

Your data recovery videos have saved countless Gigabytes! Would you consider doing lost partition recovery too?

[@deathsicon]

well, im in a similar spot, new psu fried 3 hdds, i was gonna swap the pcbs but i think im gonna check this real quick, just gotta run to the hardware store to get new fuses for my meter because they blew up working on a quad last week, thanks for the idea

[@marcusdoolette1547]

Very cool. Thanks.

[@RichardsWorld]

Hmmm.. I have a about half a dozen old disks in a box that went bad. Time to check them out. One or two of them had nasty scratching sounds though.

[@dagnu86able]

Hi there. I watched your Video and i has a HDD with exact the same error. i removed the z-diode and see, the hard disk works again. thank you for that Video!

[@schmoddd]

Educational and enjoyable content. Good stuff. Thanks.

[@bronzeblood]

Just fixed one of these the other day, Looks like the customer plugged in a 19v laptop charger into the 12v in (same plug 5.5x2.5 i think) Luckily the TVS diode blew and saved the drive, I removed the diode and recovered the data.

[@riadhch5643]

Thank you

[@teejay2130]

INSPIRING, THANKS

[@digix205]

little tip: RAW drive can sometimes be readable on Linux. (without running any tools and\or commands)

[@gl0sek]

I had that issue once so far. Those are called TVS diodes but yeah I guess you could call them zenner diodes as they work pretty much the same.

[@thereallinkmaster7434]

You're a machine

[@czrmtbwrx]

Man, my hard drive is the same issue I believe. It was shorted and smoked on me. And I’ve asked 2 local techs about it and they said it’s a LAB job. I wish you where here in the states. Because seems like you know how to fix it

[@Irich1961]

Hi Adam. Really enjoy your channel, I have found it very useful. I do have one burning question that has been bugging be for days. What is that round motherboard out of on your wall..???

[@Adamant_IT]

iMac G4 👌

[@MarcWeavers]

very informative :)

[@glennjones6004]

Nice. Thank you.

[@adamadami6516]

Thanks Man.

[@puzzleoyster]

Hello Adamant IT Thank you so much for the extemely informative and concise tutorial on this subject. I Have 5 yes 5 shorted seagate 500GB Hard drives all dead as a dodo right now, however i have a question? Could i pull a card from a working seagate 500gb identical in every way to the toasted cards! or would it be better to use the tutorial to remove the offending diode? all 5 drives are not showing up in any recovery software including testdisk

[@techhonour3821]

Mac is the test machine and Windows is the production machine. Sounds about right!

[@TheConstitutionalGuardian]

reflow with low melting point solder works well too!

[@sinanural4443]

thanks to you mine saved the same way.

[@briandewolfe]

Interesting video. Considering the drive's diode was already toast, I hardly blame you for not wanting to use the original enclosure again. I'll just throw my two cents in... Having done a small amount of recovery from external enclosures that were sold with pre-installed HDDs I've seen some that use an intentional partition offset for the user's data. In those cases the SATA board in the enclosure is often designed to appear as two devices-- an HDD *and* a small CDROM drive or pre-loaded read only partition (inside the offset area) that contains the advertised and included software for backing up etc. You would see the drive using two drive letters, but each drive letter might show as different device types. If that's the case, then connecting it to any other SATA interface other than the one it came with will show the drive as uninitialized since the layout is intentionally non-standard. I'm guessing you might have unknowingly encountered one of those weird enclosures.

[@cfcaustralia-adelaide8784]

something to remember..

[@bernaldsolano]

Man, I almost forgot how good testdisk was, thank you for reminding me how powerful it is. Also subscribed and liked your video, awesome work. Greetings from the "island" of Costa Rica! P.D: if you actually know where Costa Rica is, you'll know that we ain't an island... lol

[@MrBook123456]

very help video

[@speedyboishan87]

Excellent

[@MrOrangeman18]

What’s the new soldering tweezers called. Awesome video by the way.

[@HBProductions.]

Valuable information! I just had this happen with a Seagate 40GB Barracuda HD where the diode seems to have broken/collapsed onto itself from an overload. I just can't visually tell if it's a zenith diode or some other type of diode as you mentioned. all the text on it is toasted. I may be able to replace it though. I have a drawer full of these diodes from donor electronics. I did notice that this drive has many missing or unused areas that have no soldered components on it. Is it possible to improve the drive's capabilities/functions if I can acquire the missing components from the higher spec HD model of the same type of drive? It's something I've been curious about with mobo's and other electronics too.

[@mickybytesinformatique6837]

Hi ! I really appreciate your work. I have a Toshiba HDD 2.5 MQ04ABF100 of 1TB that I have reversed the 5v with the 12v. I can't find diode D4. How do I do ? Thank you very much