Hi everyone,

A friend of mine had a problem with his Hitachi HDP725050GLA360. The drive spins but clicks every two seconds before giving up everything after one or two minutes. Of course, it keeps on spinning and is undetected by the BIOS.

I decided to look for the same drive (P/N: 0A35415; MLC: BA2831). I succeeded.

I put donor's PCB on the dead drive but the only difference was that it did not click anymore. Totally deceived, I put back the PCBs to its 'original' drive. I put that dead drive in my USB dock, switched it on and... Surprise: a kind of life appeared and OSX told me that drive format was not recognized.

Then, I put the 'new' drive in an external case and started a copy with the 'dd' command line tool. It was really slow (1.7 Gb/hour; USB is what it is) and I gave up after a while. I took an old PC; I mounted both drives on it in order to do the same operation with Linux. Both drives were found by the BIOS. But, seen that I began copy, both partitions tables were identical and, so, I was not sure of source and destination. I switched the PC off; I disconnected the sick drive and deleted partition from the clean one.

When I connected the sick drive again, BIOS did not find it anymore. Everything fall back to the initial situation. Of course, I tried many times to exchange the PCBs those last 24 hours without any surprise coming back.

I have the feeling that something is still possible. Would anyone have any advise ? Many thanks in advance !

Damn... I was browsing the whole site and did not pay attention to the place I was before posting. Being able to delete our own posts would be a great idea.

Really sorry about that mistake !