4. The engineering company's "fried" hard disk
A user in a large engineering company was installing a memory upgrade in his desktop PC. When he closed up the PC and powered it up he noticed a burning smell and noticed that the hard disk was not spinning up. Upon removal of the hard disk it was noticed that a chip on the controller board was "fried" and a strong burnt smell was obvious. This particular drive, a late model Western Digital, does not permit for a simple board swap with a similar model to restore operation. Each drive in this model line contains unique information- specific to that drive only- stored in a flash ROM chip on the controller board. We were able to transfer the contents of the flash ROM to another controller board and restore full operation. The customer's engineering drawings and test results were saved from oblivion.