2.5” Hitachi HTS545050B9A300—when it came in to me, it would spin up and start clunking. I determined that it needed a head swap and afterwards it would spin up and come ready on the SD tool.
Does not load from drive. After loading from donor resource file, fails to read any FW mods.
Reads NVRAM and ROM but not NVRAM from SA.
To eliminate the possibility of a bad head swap or bad donor heads, I obtained a second donor and swapped the heads from the patient (which already had a donor head stack) to the second donor and the heads from the second donor into patient.
Patient drive acts the same—spins up, comes ready, will not load from drive. Second donor (now with heads that went from first donor into patient) initializes normally.
The Hitachi SD tool does not support spinning down the motor on 2.5” drives so I cannot attempt a hot swap to recover FW mods.
However, it has been suggested to me that often on Hitachi drives a hot swap does not work to retrieve patient FW modules.

Also have swapped ROM and NVRAM ICs to donor PCB with no change in symptoms. ICs are back on patient PCB.

After contacting techs at 3 different data recovery businesses, none of them having the capability to progress farther than I have on this drive, one suggested that I find someone with the Salvation Data imager which has SA emulation on it.

Other than that I'm out of ideas.

If anyone thinks they can make progress on this drive please get in touch. I can provide the second donor drive which still spins up and initializes.
I'm in the US.

Thanks,
Sam

Have you attempted to modify the heads map?

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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

Check the serial number in the NVRAM against the drive label, to rule out non-native PCB.

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

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

et see NVRAM

hi
nvram is damaged . try to open in winhex and change it to sa-c manually .
u says that it cannot gives access to nvram . try to connect this pcb without HDA ,then it will give u acces to nvram. if not. then put this pcb to donor hdd then try to read nvram.
problem is in nv ram

Labtech--I have not attempted to change the heads map.

Others--thanks for the suggestions about the NVRAM.

waqas_ali766: I CAN read NVRAM from PCB, but NOT NVRAM from SA... with patient PCB attached to patient HD. I have opened the NVRAM file with winhex and it looks normal. Is there a place in the file to change so HD will initialize and read sa-c modules or do you mean to use a jumper on the contacts on the PCB to switch to sa-c?

What labs did you contact? As you are in the US, you might want to send to DataSavers (jono-ats on this forum) in Atlanta. As you have tried lots of things, I don't think it is fair to expect a free assessment from other labs.

Good luck

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

let's see NVRAM

To be clear, I am not asking for a free assessment; I do not want to spend more time on this drive. My original inquiry was to see if anyone thinks they have the ability to recover the data based on the information I provided about the drive and would like to do the recovery for me/my customer.

Sam

I just saw the post by Moltke. Here's the NVRAM:

samick
So what is there to see?
upload to somewhere *. bin file NVRAM

I have got a similar problem with HTS545032B9A300. It doesn't have any password nor its not locked in any way. I don't need the data, but im curious about why this particular drive doesn't want to spin up (just makes a click like it would try to start and very quickly changes her mind and stays still) , want read from SA, it just reads the NVRAM, so I can show the NVRAM conent, if anyone would give it a chance and take a look. Itried using donor NVRAM and changing the incremental values in HDDoctor trying NVRAM repair, but without any success.
I am just wondering whats wrong with the drive as it came to me in that state. I have similar drives and found very close donor, and the drive then spinned up normally, BUT it still didn't read the SA modules nor the user area.
I could send the drive for free to someone who has knowledge about Hitachi NVRAM reconstruction, and if someone finds the answer and repairs the drive then the reward is this working drive for him. Couse I don't know what to do with it anyway, and would like very much to know what one can do with a Hitachi 5450 in case lack of original NVRAM (but it may be that in this case there is something wrong with RAM, ROM, PCB, i don't have a clue)
priv message if someone had a similar issue solved.
thank You in advance.

Does the drive identify itself to BIOS?

Can you upload the NVRAM and ROM contents? Are we to understand that the drive doesn't spin with patient PCB + donor NVRAM?

Can you measure any voltage pulses across the two R470 resistors (spindle current sense) and 1R00 resistor (VCM current sense), especially at the time of the click?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The drive doesn't spin with original PCB and original NVRAM - i'll do a video to show how it looks and sounds like. The drive makes a sound like the motor gets voltage, but immediately stops. although it spins up (without any initiation in BIOS) with another NVRAM uploaded on the original PCB.
With original PCB and donor NVRAM the drive spins the motor, and the platter rotation is stable. In aby case, i cannot read no SA module, and the drive is not identified in BIOS, nor any utility. although in any configuration I can read the content of NVRAM and write to it without problem.
[Please give me few hours and i will attach some files]

Can you upload NVRAM and ROM?

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI