Computer blue screened and said it was writing dump file but the line saying that was complete was missing.
I powered the computer off and turned it back on and HDD was not recognized by BIOS.
I removed the drive and immediately saw the area on the back of board and thought that was the issue although the more I've researched it I'm not so sure.
The drive spins up in an external hot dock and sounds healthy, but does not mount.
I have a compatible board to swap from a working drive and am capable of swapping U12 but have read and now have been told that it is almost certainly not the board that is the issue because of the drive spinning up, that it is probably firmware related, the person wasn't interested in seeing the picture of the board.


The situation with this drive is the data would be nice to have, but it isn't exactly critical.

I'm a bit stubborn, but not so much that I want to waste a few hours practicing a U12 swap before the real one, especially if I am only pissing in the wind.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

Judging from the black corrosion on the back of that PCB, I'd first try removing it from the HDA and clean the contacts with an eraser. Maybe you'll be lucky and it's just dirty contacts.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Will certainly give that a try, been too busy to do much with it. From the looks of it I thought a resistor or capacitor burnt out on other side.
That are is the only place that looks like that.

Thanks.