Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
March 31st, 2013, 7:32
Hi All,
got a 1tb hitachi drive here, use to be in a caddy, nothing seems to recognise, both in the caddy or directly attached to a SATA port. The drive spins up fine but isnt detected at all. Any thoughts on weather a PCB board swap will help in this scenario? I'm aware that il need to move the NVRAM chip across as well, if so anyone know where I can source the PCB from?
Cheers,
Sean
March 31st, 2013, 7:39
It spins up and sounds normal?
No clicking or any other untoward noises?
March 31st, 2013, 7:42
Yeah sounds absolutely fine, just doesn't show in BIOS no clicking or anything like that.
March 31st, 2013, 10:11
Gonna try the PCB board swap first, as cost of DR is to grate for the data thats on there
March 31st, 2013, 13:19
Ok Can you elaborate on why it wont work please? is it to do with contents of NVRAM? else surely the firmware is stored on one of the chips that will be replaced?
April 1st, 2013, 4:27
Agree.
PCB purchase is a waste of money in this case.
April 1st, 2013, 7:25
Hi Forumers
Isn't the Firmware suppose to be on an IC ? Does the Firmware in the HDD have an Original Copy on an IC in the PCB ? Is not the Firmware supposed to help access the Platters at Startup ? If one has to read the platter to access the Firmware, what is the use of the Firmware in the first place ? I think that I am a little confused
Thanks for explaining
1 - Firmware is stored on platters. If you have bad firmware modules on platters, no matter what you do with PCB the bad modules on platters will still be there. You need special tools to access the firmware.
April 2nd, 2013, 13:43
Many thanks for pointing this out, I always thought firmware would have been on the PCB, but you learn something new everyday

Now I see the likes of pc3000 and hd doctor for hitachi can bypass loading firmware from the platter and force it to load from a file. Firstly do any of you know if there is a serial header anywhere that can give me diagnostics at all?
secondly do you know how the hd doctor etc are able to put the device into a state where it will load firmware from a file, can this be done by sending ATA commands at it?
Lastly if none of the above is possible, anyone on here got either pc3000 or hd doctor for hitachi thats UK based?
April 3rd, 2013, 3:40
If you really need the data from that drive I think you should contact member pcimage from this forum ....He's from the same country as you and he knows what he's doing...
Rgds
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