Hello gurus,
my hitachi 1TB drive died and after much grieving and despairing i have found this thread:
http://forum.hddguru.com/wanted-pcb-for-hitachi-1tb-0a38016-t14580.html

The user named Alwin here asks about PCB swapping and which chip to move to "transplant" NVRAM data.
I however noticed that on my 0A38016 there is only one 8-pin chip in position U5. Refer to this picture: http://www.unityelectronics.com/common/images/products/large/5193_0A38016-R_2_huge.jpg
On my HDD there is only the chip on the left, what Alwin calls "93c86wp"(it has this written on it) or "Eeprom" chip, while the "serial flash" is missing.

I've been looking for it everywhere, but i doubt i'll be able to find it.

My HDD performs just a specific signaling sound and doesn't really start (not recognized by the BIOS), so i wanted to ask the following:

1) Is my HDD issue most likely due to the lack of this chip? Does it mean that finding and soldering the chip back would fix it? Or does it mean not having this chip has actually damaged my HDD in other ways? Could it have booted up before without this chip?

2) If i fail to find the missing chip, is another exemplar more likely to be found somewhere than the whole model-specific PCB? More complicatedly, can i perhaps fake its presence in anyway to fool my HDD into booting up at least once to backup my files?

Thank you in advance.

EDIT: (sorry for double posting)

I made some better research and it seems some models of this drive's PCB have only one chip, while others have two. Please disregard my questions above.