I need some directions on how to recover a drive.

I have a hard drive that I hope to bring back to life with a PCB swap. Let's assume it is successful. I want to copy over the data onto a new drive.

What software should I use?

I have a spare PC that has no OS on it and I was hoping I could attach the good and bad drives, run an OS on a USB stick and copy over the data using some for of a Unix OS.

Is there a tutorial with a step by step process that also included commands to recover the data? The drive is 80gb and it's pretty full if I recall. I have an extra 80gb blank drive to copy onto.

Thanks

how do you that the PCB is faulty?

I'm hoping it is the PCB. Let's assume it is the PCB that was wrong and the drive is up and running, but I'd like to recover the data now...

Sorry pal- you cannot assume here! Changing the PCB on some drives will cause complete disaster- irreversible changes to precious parts of the drive. Others nothing will happen and the last will work but the chance is small if the drive is a new generation. Usually you need to change a ROM; but sometimes its not possible either. The possibilities are endless.

You could write exactly what happened l symptoms and one of the generous souls on this forums could direct you in the correct way.

There are few tutorials because most operations need experienced hands and sometimes very expensive equipment.

Post model of hdd with all info on sticker and pcb- some image would be nice and a short description of what happened.

We see what happens.

Good Luck

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Guess I need to go into more detail, sorry.

On the PCB swap. I've found a replacement PCB that matches very closely. I do plan on swapping the U12 firmware ROM over. I'm not saying that will fix it, but if it does I'd like to move on to copying the data over. I have read up a little on ddrescue and I think that is a good approach. I downloaded the Systemrescue CD and I'll be using that. I guess I'm looking for a little tutorial of a "best case" on what I should type and what I should expect, that's all.

post pictures of the drives PCB at least so that someone can point out the ROM chip for you... if all goes well and it is the pcb. once booted to system rescue. you need to see what drive is attached to what device. so at the bash prompt type:

sudo lshw -c disk. it will show what drive is on what /dev.

then:

sudo ddrescue -v /dev/(source drive) /dev/(destination drive) logfile.txt

then wait for it to copy. thats a 1 to 1 sector copy.

ddrescue -h will bring up the help

what are the symptoms of the drive that makes you think it's pcb? just out of curiosity...

It makes a "click-click-click" sound. Not sure if that is strictly PCB related, but for a few dollars it isn't a hard thing to do find out.

what model drive is it? Click click can be headstack, can be pcb, can be a lot of things. the drive needs to be diagnosed properly or you risk the chance of damaging it even more.