A friend let her son monkey with her computer and what he managed to do is somehow knock one of the surface mounted chips off of the Dell (Hitachi) hard drive. The end result is that the drive no longer spins. I located a very close match to the hard drive on eBay (the month of manufacture was two off, but everything else matched but the s/n) and after testing that the drive worked, moved that controller to the damaged HD. Drive is now spinning, but doesn't recognize the file system. (I'm sure this is no surprise to the gurus on this board.)

I downloaded and installed MHDD on a similar Dell PC and it is able to see the drive, but, frankly, I am not a guru and really don't have the time to become one. I'm looking for one of you gurus that could help me remotely to figure this thing out. Not looking for free help, but don't want to be gouged, either. Anyone interested in helping out?

Can you take good resolution pictures of the controller boards on the side with the chips and post here.

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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

Sorry for the delay. Had to work out the photo process to post them here. I've given you pics of the drive label (top) and the PCB side (bottom) of both the old and the new (donor) drive.

Jim

What makes you think that a surface mount chip was knocked off? Were there some loose near the computer or something?

I may not see clearly, but I do not see any chip missing? Maybe you can mark it off in Paint application or SnagIt?

Either way, if unable to get the "bad" PCB to work, it seems you will need to solder the U5 chip, NV-RAM, to the donor board, because it has adaptive info for that particular drive.

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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