Hitachi 7250 series PCB swap - NVRAM issues?

[cheadledatarecovery]

Hi there,

I have a 3.5" Hitachi Deskstar 7250 series. The patient drive came in with a non-working PCB, which failed after a power surge in the customer's hosue. Fortunately I was also given an exact match donor drive which was bought at the same time.

I am using Salvation tools, which unfortunately do not support 7250 series (yet?!).

When I swap over the PCB directly I get clicking and the device stays busy, suggesting either there is an NVRAM mismatch, or the head assembly has failed. If I hot swap the PCB then the device becomes ready (suggesting HA is OK), but the LBA values are unreadable (I get a lot of 'FF'). Ordinarily I would attempt to regenerate the NVRAM however this option is not available to me for this series drive. Is there another way around this issue?

All the best,
John

[cheadledatarecovery]

Oh yes, what I presume is the NVRAM chip is at U7 on this revision of PCB.....

[HDD Spaz]

Have you swapped NV RAM chip?

Do you have PC3000 UDMA?

[cheadledatarecovery]

OK, now I've hot swapped I think the donor NVRAM infomation has written itself to the patient SA. I'll need a PC3K UDMA to access the factory mode settings to get a reserved copy of the patient NVRAM back.

[HDD Spaz]

did you back up SA before hotswap?