My external Seagate appears to have died. It was powering up for a few seconds then powering down. The disc was spinning up and I had been experiencing no problems with it.

Assuming it's just the internal power supply that's dead, will the data on the disc be recoverable?

Try putting the drive into another caddy (or an internal slot in your PC) and see what happens. If that doesn't work, you're pretty much screwed. Just looked into data recovery myself and it starts at about £500!

So I should be able to open it up and it'll be like an internal drive within the plastic casing and I can then just pop it inside the PC?

Exactly, assuming you have a spare slot inside your PC and the correct cables.

(Also assuming it's a 3.5" drive!)

Being the cautious type, when this has happened to me I try the drive in an external case, definitely not the pc – my reasoning being that I don't mind if the dodgy hard disc kills an external casing's circuitry, rather than risking the motherboard etc. on a pc. ymmv

Ok, so I managed to get the HD out of the casing. What a bloody job that was!

I slotted it into the machine and connected up the correct cables but the PC wouldn't power up

Then I unplugged it and the PC would fire up.

While the machine was on I connected the IDE cable and it was fine but as soon as I connected the HD with the power cable, the PC turned off instantly.

I'm guessing there's a short circuit or something in the HD? And I'm guessing that isn't good news???

It's pretty much dead. If you've got £100s/1000s spare, you could probably have the data recovered.

You *might* get away with swapping the controller board for an identical one, but if you've no idea what I'm on about it's not the approach for you.

I feel f'ya Bob.

Same thing happened to me last month with my Iomega Minimax. Lost tons of pics 🙁

Ive licked my wounds and bought another HD. Worryingly (afdter your post), its a Seagate.

You *might* get away with swapping the controller board for an identical one, but if you've no idea what I'm on about it's not the approach for you.

I take it controller boards aren't readily available as an aftermarket item?

The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 model number ST3200827A

Does anyone happen to have a good controller board spare that I could buy off them?? 🙁

bob – the problem is that the boards and firmware change about every 5 minutes, so finding a replacement with exactly the right board/firmware combo is pretty remote, especially since your drive is pretty old. Even then, there's no guarantee due to ROM info stored on the board which may be unique to the drive (Seagate customer services told me the chance of data recovery is about 20%, even with the right board).

There is one straw left to grasp at (which I'm about to try on mine). If the drive has died due to some kind of power problem (mine died because I accidentally plugged-in my laptop power pack instead of the external HDD one!) there is a chance that just one component on the board will have died – the Transient Voltage Suppressor (TVS). This wee widget's job is to protect the rest of the board against voltage spikes, etc. If things get really out of hand, the TVS itself will die. Some people have had success by simply removing (unsoldering) the TVS. This will let the drive power-up and function normally, but the drive is now completely un-protected, so it's a case of getting your data off as quickly as possible before the whole thing gets fried! There's a useful forum called Techsupportforums.com or something like that.