SO one of my office computers died on me and when I went to put the disk into a drive reader this happened. [img]https://i.imgur.com/NxdBzje.jpg[img]

Most of the data on the disk is of little importance but it does contain my quickbooks and an PST file that I would really like to try and get back. I contacted drive savers and they quoted 1200-2500 bucks. I am a small little cellphone and electronics repair shop and I can't afford that.

I have a 20 year IT background and have used various software tools to recover data in the past. I also have soldering equipment and pretty good working knowledge of circuit boards and drive structure so I thought I would take a shot at trying to get the data back myself and learn something along the way.

I went out and sourced 2 hard drives with the same model number and controller IC as the one I have. OA71256

The drive spins fine and makes no clicking or harsh noises but it comes up as needing initialization. After banging my head against the wall for a while and doing hours of searching I found a post leading me here. I have read some information stating that I may need to use a tool to get some data from part fo the drive and write it into the new controller firmware for it to be recognized again. Is there anyone that can help me with that or shoot me a link to this process for a Hitachi drive? Your help is greatly appreciated. In the mean time I will keep searching the fourm. You guys are great!

Possibly there is nothing major wrong with the drive. High chance of bad sectors, while lower chance of a weak/bad head.
No need to do anything with the PCB what-so-ever.

What is needed a solid plan to imaging the drive to another healthy drive. May try ddrescue and hddsupertool, which are software based and in their own right limited as far as success goes. What is best is a hardware imager.

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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

Thanks for the info! I should clarify that the original PCB is absolutely bad and with it the drive wont spin. I swapped over the PCB. as mentioned it has the same controller. The resources I found say its compatible. One thing I did notice during some trouble shooting. The controller PCBs have different ram manufacturers but same controller ID. When the failed drive wouldn't show up in windows I tried one of the donor drives and it worked - shows up and I initialized it and formatted it fine. Then I swapped the PCBs on the 2 donor drives and they both show up as needing to be initialized. I tried to do that (on a donor drive) and it fails. Which lead me down the firmware path.

I have a live disk with ddrescue on it. Ill try that and see what happens. Thanks for the info!

Ahh, so PCB was bad in the beginning, ok, makes sense now.

Though, I am very confused regarding the swapping the PCB onto the bad drive from donor and got it to work and format it and so on. That should not have been possible.

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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

When I put it on the bad drive, it wouldnt work. It showed up as needing to be initialized. I have 2 donor drives. SO I swapped those pcbs to see if maybe my bad drive was worse than expected. When swapping the PCB between the 2 known good drives they exhibited the same behavior.

I ended up physically removing the rom chip from the bad PCB and put it on one of the donor boards and I HAVE MY DATA! Yay! I found a post here talking about it.

Thanks alot for the info.

Good result!! Well done

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PC Image Data Recovery
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