I am not a HDD GURU and not looking to become one, I know my limits. I work in the forensics field and do recoveries from fire damaged phones, USB drives, chips, etc. If I get a HDD that was in a fire, it is either burned to the point that the body melted away, or is in really good shape and I take it to a local shop with a clean box to make sure it isn't flooded inside before powering it up. My local shop has limited experience at this point and I wanted a wider field of knowledge.

I have HDD now that is in between, and before I send it to a lab I wanted to see if someone can answer some questions before I start spending a lot of money.

The drive is a SATA Western Digital that will have to have a new PCB as all of the SATA connections pulled off the PCB, plus it is a little crispy. I was able to read the revision number of the board, but have no idea what the size is as the label completely burned off of the top. The bottom foil cover that is partially under the PCB on the bottom was half pulled off so I peaked inside and can see that the bottom platter is still nice and shiny. Of course no idea what happened to the top platter or any other internal damage.

I realize that the platters will have to be removed, and probably cleaned, and placed into a donor drive, but my concern is with the PCB.

Can data be recovered without swapping any of the chips from the old PCB to the new? I'm not sure that they are any good.

Without knowing the size of the drive up front, does that matter?

I'm looking for a clone of the HDD as there aren't any files that any O/S can read on the drive. The data is in a proprietary format, inside a proprietary file system, so there are no files that can be observed by the lab no matter what O/S they use, so can reading one platter at a time and then rebuilding the data be possible?

Or is this a dead drive, and I need to move on?

If it is possible, does anyone have any recommendations on a lab that has experience with burned up HDD's?

Thank you for your replies. T