Hello, I posted this on an older thread, but I don't think anyone saw it. I'd appreciate any help with this I could get; I did my due diligence and research, but as I am a neophyte with hard drive repair, it would be a relief to have someone looking over my shoulder. Thanks in advance!

Backstory: I'm trying to fix a hard drive for my brother-in-law. It was his back-up drive for his wife's pictures of their kids. Both their laptop drive and back-up drive died within a short time frame and they did not restore the back-up after the laptop died (so they would really appreciate it if you could help me fix the drive).

Basically, the hard drive does nothing at all when hooked up to an external source (an external docking station and hooked up to my desktop). It doesn't power on or register or anything. Searching through these forums, many people suggest switching out the PCB first as a low-cost potential solution. What I need help with is confirming that the PCB I found matches the drive.

Here are the drive details:

http://i.imgur.com/aOD3G.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/1xJPT.jpg

I found two PCBs that might work. Could you please tell me if either (or neither) of these would work?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/PCB-ONLY-0A2998 ... 8&x=48&y=6
http://www.hddzone.com/hitachi-pcb-oa58 ... p-299.html

Not all of the serial information matches up exactly, but this is the closest I could find. If you think one will work, I'm game to try it.

Thank you all so much for any help you can provide!

The 2nd donor PCB should be OK, but you WILL have to move the NVRAM chip (U5) from the bad board to the new one.

Be very careful with this, if you mess it up it will make recovery much harder and so MUCH more expensive.

ALL DIY ATTEMPTS ARE AT YOUR RISK, AND YOU ACCEPT THAT YOU COULD LOSE YOUR DATA BY TRYING ANY DIY SOLUTIONS,

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Thank you for the response, pcimage! This is part of the reason why I wanted to post and ask your opinion, and I appreciate your candor.

I certainly don't believe I have the capability to do the chip removal and soldering. I read in another thread (I think on this forum) that you can send your board in somewhere to have a professional do it for a fee. No one posted a link to said service, and I don't think the second link does that for you. Would you know of one I should try?

Also, for my own edification. First, is the NVRAM chip the large chip in the center of the board (sorry, I'm at work and don't have it in front of me to double check)? Second, why is is necessary to swap out this chip with a new board? Why wouldn't popping in a new board accomplish the goal of making the drive work?

Thanks again!

The NVRAM chip is a small 8-pin chip

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PC Image Data Recovery
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The nv-ram contains adaptive info specific to that drive. Therefore, another from a.replacement PCB would not work. You can use the search function in hddguru to see more threads on this topic.

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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

Somebody helped me find this link on the HDDZone page:

http://www.hddzone.com/ibm_hitachi_pcb_ ... guide.html

Looks like I'll have to find someone local to transplant the chip from the old board onto the new one. If anyone has any recommendations for online services that do this, please let me know. If not, I'll try to find a local electronics shop to do it. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Sorry for digging this up. But i have 2 PCB with the ID match 220 0A90158 01

But one has a 8 pin U7 chip and 1 does not?? are these PCB swappable. And if swappable do i need to also solder that U7 chip over???

This thread is 12 years old. I think it will be better to make your own post and include pictures of what you have.

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