Morning all,
Hope everyone is doing well. Firstly I am quite new to 'Hard drive' world so please bear with me if I make some 'silly' questions or mistakes. I am in a great dilemma as to what to do - pretty much stuck and need some advice/help - hence starting the post. I read the article on the sticky (newbie section) but I am not sure if I understood it right.
I have an Hitachi Deskstar HDT725025VLAT80 250GB IDE hard drive
(Details of full drive given below) that had been a 'victim' of water splashes. Well what happened was, I was backing up my drive while keeping it outside of the machine i.e. connected via a USB IDE connector - Since the data was huge (80GB) I left it on overnight, using a recovery program iCare data Recovery. The drive was seated on a table with PCB board facing upwards i.e. PCB was placed on top. The very next morning when I came to see if the data has been backed up or not, I found the drive was not running i.e. the drive was not spinning - upon checking the drive I saw water marks on it and the chip
6K1S511 0A29374 Japan seemed to have been shot/burnt. I quickly swtiched off the machine and tried to dry up the drive including the PCB, however, after drying up when I connected the drive, it did not start.
I was quite upset and in a shock that all my data in the drive is stuck (not lost because I heard there are methods to retrieve the data). So I started searching for cure online....
Ok so now I searched online and I found many
(now seems misleading) links that suggested to switch the PCB board of the same hard drive make and it'll come alive. So here we go, I ordered one drive with same model, same voltage
Rated: 5V 530mA 12V 640mA and switched the PCB however that did not work - so I ordered another drive but this time I matched almost everything, the Rating, Model, MLC, P/N, CHS, LBA, Capacity, the first two lines of PCB board i.e.
0A29525 BA1790 - however still not luck

.
Now I am stuck as to what to do, when I plug the 'donor' PCB the drive switches on and I see it spinning but nothing is coming up on My computer nor the recovery program detects it. If I plug the same drive with IDE cable the BIOS detects it with some weird numbers - sometimes it says 23450MB sometimes 2000GB sometimes something else. I tried to manually configure the drive in BIOS but no avail.
I was thinking it could be that the drive RAM chip and the PCB firmware needs to match so perhaps I can take the BIOS/Firmware chips off the burnt PCB and stick them to donor PCB - but I don't know which one is the BIOS/Firmware chips. I also tried to find the software or a tool from Hitachi that could allow me to update a firmware on the donor board but I failed to find one. I have searched on this forum but I can't find a firmware for my drive.
Any in-expensive ideas anyone can perhaps share would be highly beneficial and appreciative.
Here are the details of the drive and PCB
- Code:
[b]Drive Details[/b]
###############################################################
Hard Drive: Hitachi Deskstar
Model: HDT725025VLAT80
Rated: 5V 530mA 12V 640mA
Date: Dec 2006
S/N: R10M2DGM
0A33408BA2028C6C
P/N: 0A33408
MLC: BA2028
RPM: 7200RPM
CHS: 16383/16/63
LBA: 488,397,168 Sectors
Capacity: 250GB
###############################################################
[b]PCB Details[/b]
###############################################################
0A29525
BA1790
M1R645
8364
--------
6KIS5
0A29374
Japan
-------
PM25LV512
E0634
N1SNBC
----------
S93C76
ADVF8
9608
-----------------
Infineon 0A29300
UAB-M3063-S
V1.0
------------
R4D B5S Chip on the back of Hard Drive
Images of PCB and Drive

