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



Images of PCB and Drive

8-pin chips U7 and U5

Usual DIY disclaimers.... If you bugger it up it will cost you 10x than it would now etc...

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

You are better off sending this to PCimage who has the right tools to work with this problem he can move the NVRAM over and get off your data for you. This right now is a repair that will not cost a lot if you send him the drive and your donor board. If you mess this one up he is right it will cost a lot to get off your data on this one. Your drive, your data, your choice but here is close and can do this one for you.

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Iorana Haraharaini

Morning all,

Thank you for responding promptly, much appreciated. PCimage, how much do you think it would cost me to get the PCB repaired as per your suggestion using a donor board (+ approx time frame)? I hope I haven't missed any necessary information on this issue. Giving me an estimated price would allow me to arrange necessary funds (also to know if I can even afford it, hopefully avoiding breaking an arm n a leg )

Hope to hear from you soon

Best Regards