Fugitsu MPG3204AT Work Around?

[425willow]

Greetings...

I have one of the Fugitsu MPG3204AT hard drive that appears to be quite dead (BIOS cannot detect, recovery software cannot access, etc.). I have read many of the posts and responses on this forum and have learned much about the problem with these drives.

My situation is that I am OK with purchasing a new hard drive and starting over and I will.

My problem is that I have a somewhat useful backup, but there are documents that were not backed up before the drive tipped over. I would like to retrieve them, but they are not worth the $$ for data recovery.

I noticed discussion about swapping out the circuit board (also referred to as PCB?). I have another one of these hard drives (same model #, same, same) that I retired before I knew that this issue was widespread and before it became totally useless. I am willing to sacrifice it to retrieve the information on my dead drive. Then I can use both of them for street hockey pucks!

My questions are:

Is changing these [PCBs] hard to do?

How is it done?

Any idea about success?

I am curious and willing to try if it's worth a try.

Please advise,

Willow

P.S. It seems to me that I read that these defective hard drives would boot once in a while. Is it possible that it may be detected by BIOS if I leave it in auto detect as a slave?

 

[bcastner]

You really should Google the drive, as it is possible it can be replaced under Warranty.

My understanding is swapping the controller board will not allow you to access the drive. You need to unsolder the Good Cirrus logic controller and replace the controller chip on the "bad" board. This is decidedly non-trivial.

There were some companies advertising that they could do a board-level repair of the drive. A Google search will help you discover them.