Hi, I'm hoping you guys can help me. This forum is a font of knowledge and I've learnt a lot from reading through the posts.

I'm having a problem trying to recover data from a faulty Hitachi Deskstar. The data isn't critical so I don't want to spend money having it professionally recovered. I think I have made the situation worse in my attempts but I hope I can still make some progress.

The faulty disk stopped booting so I ran some tests on the drive. It passed the SMART test showing no errors but failed the cache test. I was hoping swapping the PCB would enable me to recover some data. I didn't read about swapping the VRAM chip from the old board until after I had made the swap. Now the disk is not recognised in the BIOS with either of the boards installed. The donor disk is also not recognised in the BIOS.

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to get the disk recognised again? Have I done some permanent damage? If I now swap the VRAM chip over will this allow the disk to be recognised in the BIOS? Is it always the chip at U5 that should be swapped?

Sorry if this has been posted before but I couldn't find anything in the forum.

The drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 123.5GB
Model: HDS722512VLSA80
P/N: 13G0253

Thanks for reading my post,

Rob, newbie

Probably now you have TWO problems at the price of ONE. If you don't want to spend you have an hi-tech doorstop / paperweight.

Seriously, only with specialized equipment is possible to fix the FW now (if it is the problem). It is possible thet you have done some corruption on the eeprom in both boards.