I am wondering if I can try swapping the PCB for a relative's HDD with some decent chance (>20%) of recovering data. He took it to Geek Squad, I think, and learned that it was dead. He doesn't want to pay any more for the digital photos on it, but I am willing to spend $40 for a PCB to swap in, if I can find one. Is there a thread somewhere (or a web site) that explains what is involved with swapping a PCB? I can probably handle complexity at the software level, but can't do much at the physical level other than screw in a different PCB.

Also, because of my curiosity (I wanted to find the exact firmware version number), if anyone can identify any of the many cryptic codes on the HDD, I would learn something.

1. Manufacturer Name
2. Product Name
3. Model Number
4. Size, Bus it uses, Type of Product
5. ?
6. ?
7. ?
8. Serial Number of this particular HDD
9. ?
10. ?
11. ?
12. Voltages/Milliamps used by this drive
13. Manufacturing Date of this particular HDD
14. ?
15. ?

What does "dead" mean?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

For this drive you need to match number 3, that's it (for a PCB swap). You also don't need to solder anything
But if the drive spins up - it is highly unlikely a PCB issue

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.