I have a Samsung HD204UI which I purchased back in Sept 2010, to be used for backups. The drive has been in storage all of the time. When I tried to use it last month, it failed. It spins up properly, but it cannot read any sectors at all.
When attaching to a computer via USB, it makes a repeating mechanical noise, as if trying to read the sector over and over.

The drive is recognized by the BIOS, and the ESTOOL.EXE is able to see it and run the diagnostic.
The ESTOOL.EXE diagnostic shows errors in all the read operations, including the random sector read test. All the other tests pass.

Most of the data I had on the drive exists elsewhere, except for about 5GB of video clips that I would like to recover. Given that the drive was in storage, and physical damage is impossible, I am theorizing that it may be a PCB fault.

I tried to swap with a PCB from a working drive with identical part number (HD204UI/Z4), however this results in the drive not being recognized at all. There must be more to just exchanging PCBs, however, this is where my knowledge of HDD technology stops.

Would appreciate any advice. Given the low importance of the data I would like to recover, I cannot really justify spending 100s of $$ for data recovery. If you have any additional advice for narrowing down the problem, please let me know. Has anyone performed a PCB swap in this type of drive before?

Many thanks in advance.

HDD P/N: HD204UI/Z4 REV.A
S/N: S2HGJ1AZ806590
P/N (LABEL ON TOP OF DRIVE): A6461-E46A-A5ZXA
PCB S/N: PATZE8DBB30161

If your board has an 8-pin serial flash memory, then you need to transfer this chip to your donor PCB. That said, it sounds like your drive has an internal fault, not PCB.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.