Hi,

Some day my HDD (Samsung S2 portable 320 GB) stopped being detected. I've tried to recover the data trying:
- soldering directly onto the HDD PCB SATA "terminals", - no result
- swapping the PCB from a working second identical drive I've bought - no result
- today I swapped the heads - no result - disc acts just like before swapping.

I posted a short movie with the cover open documenting the disk behavior.

https://youtu.be/JuoK2c9DwiM

Can you please tell me what is the cause of the behavior and is there a way to recover any data?

Regards from the great Bungholio.

Not the best thing to power on the drive with lid off, and no cleanroom environment
Could be incompatible heads, bad surface....I can hear a high pitch note.
Take it to a pro if data is important.

_________________
Rescue IT Datarecovery service Sweden
Rescue IT Dataräddning Göteborg AB
http://www.rescue-it.se

Thanks for the reply.

Yeah, i know that it's a bad idea to open the HDD not in a clean room, but i consider those drives garbage so I'm just giving a try..

The data is not as important to pay the price for a pro recovery.

Regarding the head compatibility i really doubt that this could be an issue because firstly the drives are identical and secondly the head in the broken HDD before swapping behaved exactly the same.

So I think that now only a plate failure could be left and that means there is no way to recover the data at home.

What do you think?

How do you think the bad drive failed?

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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