Hello, im new to this fourm and im posting this question because this is really my first time ever encountering a issue like this.
Ive done data recovery before but never when there was ACTUAL physical damage.

So to basic throw this all in a nutshell, i was repairing a older computer 2005-06 ish. I ended up swapping motherboards&cpu because the motherboard and AMD cpu that she had was JUST f$#ked.... so to speak. It booted up then would hang&pixel. Never liked AMD tbh+ i didn't have another AGP card to test with.
So i used a extra board i had, installed XP, corrected all permissions, found all the data.
2 days later my friend tells me he has a old board for the same type of CPU. Much better board... SATA, and not a mini atx.
So i was given it, i installed it. Next thing i know, i press the power button and look up thinking im going to hear the computer beep then display the bios. NO!, next thing i hear and smell is the PSU saying hello to a surge!!! VROOM-pause-VROOM-pause-VROOM, went the little fan on the motherboard.
At that point you've never seen someone move so quick. Not my computer, not my data... sob.
I immediately unplugged the PSU from the wall. Unplugged the drives, thew them in my work computer to check for problems.
First one i put in.... failed WD200BB-00CAA0 , the "Seagate" QuantumFireball , and dvd drive still were fine. However the ram, psu, cpu are more or less garbage now.

So right now im sitting with 1 drive that has DATA that needs to be recovered. Ive looked at howto's but im still a bit confused.... to many diffrent models.... lba's, DCM.... ect.
So far ive bought 2 PCB's with no success on recovering the data. The 1st was like the original but has a resistor in place of where a screw hole was... that was my first failure. So the second PCB i bought was IDENTICAL, and also powers the drive however this is where i tested the original board out to find out... the original PCB works in the bios!!..... it just wont spin the drive and HANGS on the bios. "Fried motor controller"?
In anycase, with the working PCB it spins the drive and shows up in device manager in windows, but it will not display the partition.
Is the head components fried ? Is the DMC not allowing the partition to display or allowing the head to read the proper area for that to happen? Did the surge wipe any area the HEAD was sitting on when the drive was spinning ?
Here are all the infos for the drive. If i could get some expert help it would be much appreciated.

WD200BB-00CAA0
DCM-HSEHNA2AH
LBA 39102336
DATE: 01/JUL/02

Can you post a picture of the component side of the fried pcb and the donor pcb?

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There's not visible damage, i left that part out.

OLD


NEW


Front


Back

Now here's what happens in the bios.


Hangs... waiting for IDE device.
wait a few min and half "never timed it" but i get the idea that it's the fact the drive is not saying the drive is spinning.

After i saw the drive # i really was like wtf ??? Then it struck me, this PCB is in fact for a 120gb and not a 20gb.
The difference lays within the platters. 1 is 20gb and the other is 100gb. 2 platers=120gb.

Awaiting admin approved post..... 6 hours later.

BUMP!
Also Correction... seeing that i cant edit. The 2nd photo is Orig and the 3rd is the Donor PCB.

ISSUE RESOLVED.
Ordered 3 drives. Tested 1 donor PCB.
The one with last 5 digits of DCM with matching LBA allowed the partition to be read again.
Checked with Gparted before trying to backup in windows.

PCB swap+last 5 digits of DCM+matching LBA= problem solved.
Thanks for the help

Did the part number of the WD MCU match? I notice that one PCB has a WD70C23 whereas another has a WD80C24.

You say you tested one donor PCB. Does that mean that you didn't try the other two donors?

Congratulations, BTW.

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