Question: Hi all, dont laugh I did something stupid.
I had an external hard drive that was taking ages to transfer files so I took off the side of the pc and plugged it into the sata. However as I disturbed some cables I ended up taking all the hard drives out and re routing the cables tidy it up.
However I think i on my Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD there are two power connections sata and molex. I’ve only gone and plugged them both in ?
Now the drive is not working, however in my usb hdd hub it spins up and the arm moves about. Not picked up by windows though.
Is this drive finished?
Would a pcb swap save my data?
Where is the park position for the arm? on mine it is currently on the platter towards the middle (never even noticed it before)
Who’s idea was it to have both power connectors on this hard drive? I’ve never seen anything like it.
Answer:There was a transitional period when buyers of SATA HDDs would have installed them in non-SATA PCs. WD gave them a choice of power connectors. However, I don’t understand why there was a problem, unless the PSU has split rails. That is, the 4-pin Molex supplies may not share the same transformer winding as the SATA supplies, in which case you would be shorting them together via the HDD. Alternatively, if your PSU is modular, and if you have swapped cables between different PSUs, then that could cause problems also.
That said, I can’t imagine how this would have damaged your HDD in such a way that it still spins up. 😕
BTW, a straight PCB swap will most likely not work. You would need to transfer the chip at U12 from patient to donor.
This supplier includes a free firmware transfer:
https://www.hdd-parts.com/12103522.html