5 May
2010
5 May
'10
12:39 p.m.
On 4 May 2010 at 20:28, Tony Duell wrote:
That depends on whter the NVRA was damaged, or simply corrupt, surely?
Didn't the OP mention that the NVRAM appeared to have been resoldered. Of
course that might just have been elimintating dry joints.
[True story, but nothing to do with disk drives. A freind asked me if I
could attempt to make one good HP16C out of 2 broken ones. Well, I took
them apart. In one, the PCU weas clearly doing something, in the other
the bus lines looked totally dead. So I desoldered the CPU chips (there
are only 2 chips in these machines, the CPU and the R2D2 (ROM/RAM/Display
Driver)) and put the 'good' CPU into the machine that had contained a
dead CPU. It then woerked. For a laugh I soldered the 'dead' CPU into the
other machine. It worked too. All I can assume is that there were dry
joints on the PCB. I resoldered the R2D2's as well, just in case and
returend _2_ working machines]
I think what would bother me most is the
seemingly random pricing
structure. If they had said 'We will recover the data from your drive
for $1000, flat rate' then fine. Pay them the money if they get your
data back. But if they are going to have different charges according
to what work they do (e.g whether the HDA has to be opened in a clean
room) they I think they have ot eplain what work they did to justify
those charges.
Do you know if the NVRAM was replaced (did you mark the old chip, or
note down the date code, or...)? Does the old drive now work
correctly? (Not that I would trust it for any important data, but it
would be interesting to test it)).
The NVRAM on the Deathstar is JTAG-programmable (in fact, this is one
way to get around the password scheme). I suspect that the recovery
house simply reprogrammed it. Had it been an actual board-level repair, I suspect that the price would have been much
higher, if the
basic "we'll look at it" price was $700.
Oh, I don;t know. If you know which chip to change, I cna't believe it
takes that much work to change it. The inpsection fee might cover
repairing simple faults like that -- as we all know very often you can't
find some faults until others are repaired.
-tony