On 5 Sep 2005 14:42:17 -0400, Captin
<UseLinkToEmail@HardwareForumz.com> wrote:


>There are two sub categories if you like for general hard drive
>failure ..

.... or we can call it 1: can't get data
.... or we can further sub-divide or distinguish them
differently.

>
>One is either no power or the short circuiting of power.

Not necessarily, it isn't really so useful to generalize
along a tangent like this but if you want to lump everything
into a generalized "circuit board problem" category, that
could be considered reasonable towards the end of replacing
the circuit board.


>Call me slow but I usually check this out first because without it
>even my brother who is a software junky is going nowhere if the drive
>is installed inside a PC without it.

How do you "check it"?

>I would say that almost 50% of
>general failures belong here and the easy answer is to replace the
>controller board even if it is tempory to regain your data.

50% seems a rather arbitrary presumption, but even so, sure
if you have a bad board and replace it with a viable board-
replacing a bad subcomponent with a working one is an
age-old practice.


> It was posted that it is "Monkeys Work" to replace a board and I
>couldn’t have said it better myself and don’t see why people would
>suggest we need to pay $50 an hour to have that done if the average
>Joe can jump on a forum, get a few tips which make it easy for him.
>Maybe I will start a thread about controller boards?

You claim "monkeys work", but then that you need more
information. Threfore, you have classified yourself as
having lower skill than a monkey for this task and
therefore, for this task you should hire a "monkey" to do
it.

What task doesn't seem like mere monkey's work if you only
consider the easiest/obvious parts and then decide all you
need is all the rest- the parts that aren't so easy or
obvious? What profession doesn't have "easy parts"
intermixed with the actual details, skills needed to get
that job done? Certainly it's not rocket science to swap a
drive's circuit board, but then rocket science must also
have mundane issues as well as that part about "rockets".

Sure, you can do almost anything if you pay attention to
detail, if the information is available and you spend the
extra time. If any of these factors are missing, you may
have less satisfactory results and hopefully instead of
doing something outside of your own profession, you could
simply spend the time doing something you ARE skilled at,
leaving those things you aren't, to someone who IS skilled
at them.

Where does it end? I'll bet most of the work you do every
day is "monkeys work" except for those parts that aren't!
So why would anyone pay you to do that work if they can get
someone who doesn't know how, to do it cheaper? After all
that other somone only needs the skills they don't have that
you do, right? Clearly we should just do away with all
professions and be jacks-of-all-trades? No, in general that
would result in a lower quality of life and specific to HDD
data, your best course is to find a professional and pay for
not only their obvious actions but the experience they have
in dealing with the not-as-obvious details. However, when I
write "professional" I don't mean a general purpose computer
technican.

That is, IF the data is actually valuable, which I contend
it was not else you'd have backed it up already, this would
be an implausable scenario to begin with, except if we
consider someone thinking backups are "monkeys work" and
that they know better. Apparently some things are best left
to professionals.