In a freak accident, beer was spilled onto a laptop which saturated the PCB of the hard drive. Mounted in an external enclosure, the drive would not power up or spin at all. I tried cleaning the PCB as best I could to no avail. The hard drive itself looks perfectly clean.

The hard drive model is:
Hitachi HTS541616J9AT00 160GB IDE
P/N: 0A28419
MLC: DA1574

The sticker on the PCB for this drive contains the following:
0A50458
DA1554
X54739
11CC

I ordered a PCB off eBay which was "pretty close" with the following sticker numbers:
0A50458 (same)
DA1554 (same)
Mdr734 (different)
C4VD (different)

With the new PCB, the drive powers up and spins. It never appears as a drive to the computer however, and I can tell that the drive is stuck in some sort of cyclic pattern based on the clicks/whirrs of the drive.

I'm assuming I'm in one of two situations:

1) The PCB is not the correct one for this drive.
2) The hard drive itself is damaged.

I'm hoping it's #1. Does anyone know if the replacement PCB I bought is correct for my hard drive? The numbers on the PCB didn't indicate if they were P/Ns or S/Ns, or some combination of both. I'm kind of stuck at this point.

Any ideas? Thanks!

If it is CLICKING cyclically there's something else than PCB damage. In any case, simple PCB swap won't work straight away.

P.S. if you don't know what to do, ask someone who can diagnose the disk with proper equipment.

Straight PCB swap on Hitachi will never (well, 99.999%) work anyway, like BlackST says.

You will at least need to transfer the NVRAM info over to the new PCB, which contains a pretty much unique SA start address amongst other things.

99% sure the PCB you have is the correct one (i.e. it has the same ROM version).

Clicking/whirring is not good, usually with an NVRAM mismatch the drive spins up and goes straight to DRDY and just sits there, no access.

Sounds like you need pro help on this one.

Sure you "could" try an NVRAM swap but that chip is REAL small and easily bugger-upable, and if this happens it's MUCH harder to fix the problem. But with the clicking, it's likely to be a fruitless risk.

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

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

Upload a detailed photo of the component side and one of us will identify the NVRAM (EEPROM) for you.

Otherwise my notes may help:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_ICs.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diodes.txt

This article may also be useful:
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.