Maxtor hard drive repair - motor does not spin up

[bogdan2014]

I have an older Maxtor hard drive that does not spin up. I suspect the fault to be somewhere in the motor control section. The person that gave it to me for repair has also has an identical functional unit so I can salvage replacement parts.
I checked the 12V rail and found a blown transistor. I also replaced the motor driver and checked the motor windings with the other unit. Now when I plug it in, the motor driver IC gets really hot, but the motor still doesn't spin up.
There's no datasheet for the motor driver IC since apparently it wasn't ever released for the public, only for manufacturers, so I don't know what to check anymore.
I'm hoping I won't have to take a trip to the data recovery specialists, so maybe someone has some idea of what might be faulty.

[Ed.Kloonk]

If the drive contains data that has not been backed up, the data recovery specialist is probably the best bet.

[james_s]

I would start by swapping the board from the working drive into the dead one and see if it spins up. If it doesn't then the fault is with the spindle and you  know it won't do any good to repair the board.

[Ranayna]

If the data on the disk is worth money, stop doing experiements with the electronics, and get the disk to a recovery specialist.

Do not perform a simple board swap.
At least you would have to transfer the eeprom containing the individual disk data. Just doing a board swap has the potential to destroy data.

[NOON Design]

How old is the drive? The bearings are often seized. There's an abundance of methods around to try and get them spinning again but it's usually a once-off to get some data off. Restoration is a whole different process and much more involved.

[bogdan2014]

I guess it's a fairly old drive since it's got an IDE interface. I'm only interested in getting the data from it.

[Fraser]

I have experience of high hours IDE era drives that work 24/7 for many years but once left in storage for a while they refuse to spin up the platters. We did not investigate the fault but believe the motor lubrication is involved. Some drives would spin up after the motor was rotated with external stimulus. That is to say, we held the drive between fingers and thumb and ‘spun’ our wrist 90 degrees to impart a turning motion into the platters and motor. This worked on some drives but not others. You could also try warming the motors lower (exposed) casing with a hair dryer to warm up the motors bearings. Both of these actions should be done with the drive unpowered is course !

I advise against any thoughts of opening the drives platter chamber unless you are willing to potentially lose all chances of data recovery.

The motor drive IC can fail but it may just be responding to a stalled motor situation. As has been stated, a PCB change may involve moving flash memory IC’s as well as these contain individual drive specific data. If the motor drive IC is faulty, you could use a known good drive as a donor for this part and keep the original PCB etc. Do check for failed capacitors and shorts on the original PCB power rails though.
Good luck.

[Rasz]

you can always put the "bad" PCB on the spare drive and see if it spins up

[james_s]

That's exactly what I suggested earlier.

Most (all?) hard drives use sensorless brushless motors, they have very little starting torque, doesn't take much friction to stall one.

[Gyro]

That's exactly what I suggested earlier.

Most (all?) hard drives use sensorless brushless motors, they have very little starting torque, doesn't take much friction to stall one.

No. You suggested swapping the board from the good (spare) drive into the one he's trying to recover (thus risking data corruption due to different eeprom data).

Rasz was suggesting the opposite - putting the board from the drive that the OP is trying to recover into the spare drive to establish whether it's a spindle driver or mechanical stick issue. It doesn't matter if the data on that one gets corrupted.

Personally, I would be wanting to take an eeprom image of both boards first!

[fzabkar]

This archived web page had oscillograms for good and bad spindle motors (Maxtor):
https://web.archive.org/web/20080812225215/http://nazyura.hardw.net/000004.htm

I would test each of the windings (Edit: I see you have already done that).

There is an array of resistors near the motor controller. If it is grounded at one end, then this would be the current sense for the spindle motor. Perhaps you could measure the voltage drop when the motor is trying to start?

The other resistor array would be the current sense for the voice coil motor.

Edit:

Could it be a stiction fault, ie heads stuck to platters? You would hear very faint beeping or buzzing if this were the case.

[Doctorandus_P]

Hold the HDD in one hand, and then rotate it CW and CCW a bunch of times by flicking your wrist.
Do this while the HDD has power (& data).

The goal is to have the disks rotating a bit relative to the housing due to the inertia of the disks itself. The combined torque of the motor and your movements may be enough to overcome the increased fricton of the motor.

Once the thing is rotating, it's much more delicate then a disk with parked heads, so It's a good Idea to have a towel or something other soft to lay the disk on.