I have a HTS541680J9SA00 that had water marks on far corner of the PCB (laptop suffered a water spill). The drive spins up but does not detect. no burn marks, no water near breather holes.
Board is:
HTS541680J9SA00
P/N 0A53318
MLC: DA1905
PCB 0A52020
DA1672C
1P3T

My question is, is this a potential donor board:
HTS541680J9SA00
P/N 0A53318
MLC DA1905
PCB 0A52020
DA1672C

and would swapping the PCB to this donor involve an NVRAM reflash, i.e. is it possible to extarct it despite not being detected? or do i have to resort to a hard transplant to this board?
and what does the DA1672C stand for?

This is a family owned drive and no worry of potential destructive recovery methods since it's not of enough value but more so my own personal goal/interest and learning experience.

Sorry, I mean what does 1P3T mean?

and the donor board is 3XGM

Hi, for the pcb to fit you need to match the first two lines of the pcb number...when they match you need to either reprogram the nvram or desolder/resolder the rom chip.

Bosse

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

Thank you for taking the time to reply.
Is this the rom chip for this board (U6) on the right side?

What are the markings on U6?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I really appreciate the replies. This was a success for the most part and an exciting project.

I relocated it to the donor board. Plugged it into the mac and it identified/mounted the partitions. I started copying the a folder and it stopped responding at about 60% of copying files in Finder. Now upon reconnecting the HFS partition only show up as 'RAW'. Read attempts with TestDisk in windows report error reading sectors. Trying a raw dump now but by the sounds of the disk it's having trouble with every sector.

Would this indicate head damage or a dirty platter?
Why would it work for a short while and stop?

Can't really answer. Proper testing is necessary.

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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

This model is known of having many problems. G-List problem, media damaged, weak head(s), sudden ATA password lock etc, etc.

If its model is still being detected normally in BIOS, I suggest you check using MHDD to see what really is going on.