A couple of months ago I had made a clone of the hard drive of a ThinkPad and swapped the drives. At the time the TP's drive had some odd behavior and didn't report good results on one SMART test.

Yesterday I used that questionable drive, now in the ext. FW/USB2 case used to make the clone, to see if a FW/USB PCMCIA card was working. The drive didn't spin up. To check if it was the drive or the card, I connected the HD to the firewire port on my 366 FW iBook. POP!! with a spark and smoke at the hard drive end of the cable.

Luckily the iBook's FW port still works. Obviously it was the drive that was bad, possibly frozen. That drive and cable are now in the trash.

That was scary!

Cool!

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[www.zeemaps.com]

Welcome to the club, working with a large number of failed client drives I have learned never to be surprised at the range of symptoms one can experience with failing drives (including the smoke and stink symptom you encountered) I now keep one extremely low cost external enclosure specifically for tinkering around with failing drives least they take out some of my better OWC enclosures.
I consider it a disposable circuit breaker or surge protector, sacrificing itself first rather than my better equipment. (especially the FW ports which I lost both of in my earlier G4 DA and had to install card to replace)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/15/2006 10:10AM by tortoise.

Destroying Hard Drives is fun.

We got a huge box of HD's, and some that were known bad, we took the casing off, connected them and did some 7200RPM engraving!


Good to hear that you had the data backed up and such!

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Security is just a word. The act of being secure is entirely different.
"...but I think that to make your dream a reality, having a dream itself is a mandatory prerequisite"
From A Book: Walking Through The Impossible

Just because it has two clutches, shifts faster, uses a torque converter or has near-infinite gear ratios, requires less driver intervention and is more efficient doesn't make it better in my opinion.
Save The Manual Transmission

we had a pc start smoking. A chip on the HD controller had popped/melted/caught fire or something. I have seen transistors do this,but not ICs.

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