Hi, and thank you for any support I may receive. Here is the situation. A customer of mine has 2008 Power Mac. He tried to install a video card and he put the power plug in backwards. This fried his Mac and also the Seagate 2 tb primary drive that he had running that computer. The drive did not even turn on after the incident. I took the PCB board off the drive to look for signs of damage but did not find any visible problems and there is no burn smell coming from the drive. I figured I'll just get a replacement PcB board and that might fix the problem. So we ordered an identical Seagate drive from Ebay. The P/N matches, the model matches, the firmware is also the same on both pcb boards. Everything on both boards is identical except the S/N, and the manufacturer data, all else matches. I put the new pcb board on the old dead drive and sure enough it is spinnig up and turns on but when it's plugged into to the Mac it shows up as 4.86 gigs instead of 2tb, and asks to be initialized because the Mac can't read it. So the good news is it turns on, but the data is not visible. My question is this, there is a company called PCB solutions that does Pcb rom chip transfers. By putting the old rom chip on the new PCB by PCB solutions do anything differently than what I already did. I was under the impression that if 2 identical pcb boards match, you can swap them out onto a dead drive and that drive reads like it used to. Is there any additional data on the old bad Pcb board that didn't come on the new Pcb board from Ebay. What will PCB solutions do exactly that I haven't already done? Thanks again in advance for any help.

First it might have been unnecessary to spend money on a new PCB when all you needed to do was to check a few components on the original board. I expect some of the protection Diodes on the board blew and preventing the drive from spinning up, snipping them off would normally do the trick, but if you can post pictures, then people here can have a closer look.

When you do a PCB swap, there is a small FRAGILE chip that stories all the drive data that is made only for that drive, it will need to be moved to the new board, however newer drives tend to have this information embedded into the main processor of the hard drive, making it almost impossible to swap.

So, send some images and we will see what we can do.

Noticed how I used the word FRAGILE. I just done a chip transfer at home and the damn thing crumbled into little bits... Never mind, the drive was a buggered up one anyway...

Shane