I was putting my hard drive, a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 40gb into a new system since I was having some problems with my old. I got everything all set up, and then turned the system on, only to be greeted by smoke coming out of the open case and the smell of burning electronics. I quickly pulled the power and shut it off and looked to see what had happened. I couldn't find anything wrong until I pulled out the hard drive. It had arced (sp?) with the hard drive below it, and due to the weird design of the case, I didn't realize it needed to be put in a special way. So a chip on the controller card on the bottom was completely destroyed. I'm wondering, can I find the controller card from Maxtor and simply replace it and see if the HD works? Or buy a new identical hard drive and try and swap them? Otherwise it's going to cost me at least $350, depending on how damaged it is inside, to recover my data, which is very important since I've been lazy about backing it up. Anybody have any experience with this, or any recommendations? I really don't want to pay to have the data recovered, but I will if I have to. I'm very experienced with compute repair (ironic I know) as this is my first accident in quite some years. Thanks for the advice.
