Years ago I bought two 160GB Seagate external drives, then at some point I didn’t double check which power converter I was grabbing and the little 12vDC drive got a nice 18vDC over-voltage and it blew out the drive. The loss of the HD wasn’t a huge deal since it was empty at the time, but the USB to IDE converter was now curiously showing up in windows as a “Cypress AT2LP RC58”.
A lot of googling around led me to many sites where they suggested using dbflash.exe to restore the EEPROM, which was suggested to be corrupted. I tried, and the tool was successful in flashing the EEPROM, but for whatever reason now it wouldn’t even show up as a USB device in Windows or Linux! FAIL!
So, after some testing the boards, it seemed that nothing was blown, but the controller has suffered amnesia. I discovered that there was an EEPROM on the board which looked familiar. I removed the EEPROM from the still working unit and read out all the data to my computer, then flashed the failed drive’s EEPROM. After re-soldering everything, the unit came up as something different. I took out the IDE drive, and replaced it with another laying around, restarted it, and tada! We have a drive again.
Interesting to see that the over-voltage killed the hard drive, and blanked the EEPROM, but little else.