Well during a big machine to machine migration a friend and I had a disaster. He recently lost an older Acer Predator i7 to heat caused by extreme dust buildup (seems to have frigged the regulator on the MB) rather than piss around with that he opted to just get a newer more modern machine. Unfortunately this machine didn't have enough 3.5" drive bays and we ended up using my trusty external USB3.0 / SATA interface to hook some drives in to determine what to shuffle around. We plugged in his first drive and powered up and saw the drive without issue. We tried the next drive and suddenly we heard the USB connect/disconnect noise over and over again about 20 times. I told him hey man that isnt normal. We powered down grabbed a laptop and tried it on that, same thing.. ding / doing / ding / doing. Suddenly the drive spun down, my USB interface light went out and that was that. I at that point noticed that the drive PCB was warm as frig. Closer to nose inspection yielded the "uh oh burnt resistor" type smell.

I at that point realized bad things ahead. I told him where the drive wasn't dropped there may not be physical head/platter issues so maybe we can send it off the PCB for a PCB/Rom swap. On that note does anyone know how successful something like this may be given what I've said? I am in Canada is there somewhere locally that can do this affordably? I bought a micro screwdriver set that had the T3 or whatever it was and I've since removed the board while using anti-static strap / pad and the rev. # is clearly marked.

If anyone has some expertise on this please advise...
(PS: First time posting here so hopefully I haven't completely posted in wrong forum or pummeled the gods of etiquette)

Can you post a high resolution picture of the PCB so we can see the damage? A PCB replacement, with a ROM transfer between the patient and the donor, might be enough, as long as the surge didn't affect the head preamp or cause the heads to touch down on the platters.

Also, it might be helpful to say where you are located here in Canada.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

hddparts-com are in Canada. They can supply a PCB with ROM swap for US$50.

TVS diode FAQ:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=100&t=86

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I will post shortly a hi-res picture. In Nova Scotia.

There is a high-res image of the board I don't like the looks of the chip between the two R47 components. At first I thought it was some sort of adhesive on the chip but now I'm thinking it 'erupted' but even under 5x magnification I can't quite tell. I'm hoping to hell that isn't the ROM.

(Board / Taken with Samsung s7)

That's a damaged regulator. I suggest you buy a replacement PCB + firmware transfer from https://www.hdd-parts.com/

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A backup a day keeps DR away.