Electrical damage · job log · RDG-2025-1778
A Brand-New Supply, and an Old Cable.
A new graphics card wanted more power than the old supply could deliver, so a wedding videographer at Spencers Wood, in Shinfield, fitted a bigger unit to his edit machine and reused a drive lead that had been cable-tied in there since the day I built the machine
. It seated perfectly. It looked identical. He pressed the power switch and got a bang, and then that smell of electronics burning
. Three films were still owed to customers. Since that moment the 4TB WD Blue holding the summer's footage has been completely silent.
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What actually caused it.
The two ends of a drive lead are not equal. The end that meets the drive follows a published pin order, so that half is safe on any lead you like. The end that meets the power supply is the manufacturer's own business: it changes between ranges, changes again when a range is replaced, and offers nothing on the outside to tell one scheme from another. Put an old lead into a new unit and the connector will seat beautifully while five-volt pins receive twelve. The board then does what it was designed to do — its protection diode shorts, drags the rail to earth, fails in the process, and passes nothing further inward.
What this one needed on the bench.
How every job runs →| Bench tools | Its part in this job | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|
| ACE Lab PC-3000 Express | Proved the harm ended at the board before power went anywhere near it | Gets into the manufacturer's own service mode, which plain ATA never reaches |
| PC-3000 Data Extractor | Took every sector the moment the drive reported itself ready | Copies at firmware level, through the drive's own controller rather than around it |
| R-Studio Technician | Lifted the NTFS tree out of the image and checked it against his booking diary | Handles almost any file system, and puts an array back together off the images |
What the bench did.
How far the surge actually travelled
A microscope and a current-limited supply settled the extent of it inside ten minutes: one regulator gone, a protection diode shorted, heat marking around the pair of them, and nothing beyond. The component that would have ended this job is the preamplifier, and it lives inside the sealed body on the head stack, where no part of that surge reached.
One donor board, and the single chip that must move
A board of the right revision was already in stock, and the eight-pin ROM soldered to it stayed put. The chip that mattered came off the failed board and went onto that replacement. That chip is what ties any board to one particular drive — its contents were written from these platters and this head stack on the day the unit was assembled. Without it a drive will spin, sound perfectly healthy, and return rubbish.
Copy it while it is still willing
With three deliveries already booked, the Data Extractor was wired up and waiting before the replacement board went anywhere near the drive. The mechanics had taken none of it: the rate never wavered, nothing new appeared in the defect list, and the image was complete by breakfast.
What went back.
All three edits came off the image undamaged, and every film was delivered on the promised date. The leads from the old supply travelled back in the parcel, taped into one labelled bundle, so that none of them turns up in a future build. The price was the published £300 + VAT for a drive, given in writing before the board was touched.
If this sounds like yours, start here.
More jobs that began with the power.
If that sounds like yours, stop there.
Post it in as it is, switched off. Looking costs nothing, and you get one fixed figure in writing before any chargeable work begins — £250 + VAT for a card or stick, £300 + VAT for a single drive, from £500 + VAT for RAID and NAS. On most jobs, nothing is charged unless your data comes back.