I'll try to give as much information as possible.

I had a Hitachi 500GB Deskstar HDD as my primary drive with the OS and most of my data on it. I had purchased a Western Digital 1 TB HDD for data back up and increased storage.

Upon getting the 1 TB HDD, I attempted to connect it to the computer while it was still on. I'd done so many times with other HDD's and nothing bad happened, until now.

I proceeded to plug in the 1 TB's power connector, then the SATA connector, but as I did so, sparks shot from the port, so I immediately stopped and unplugged the power connector then plugged in the opposite way, with the SATA connector first. Obviously the computer didn't see the drive, so I reset the system.

The computer boot was incredibly slow, so I checked the page stating how far it was and what it was doing and it was stuck on "Auto-detecting SATA drives". After 20 mins, it finally booted; however, it was in Ubuntu which is on my 3rd HDD.

In other words, my main HDD, the Hitachi 500 GB, wasn't seen and thereby, didn't boot Windows 7.

The 1 TB HDD was seen and so no damage had occurred to it according to SMART. The power connector I had used was routed through my main HDD, so I can only imagine when it shot sparks, it had caused a sort of "power surge" through that drive.

I've tested it with all of my SATA ports and cables and the Hitachi 500 GB HDD can't be seen by the computer. While it is plugged in and the system is booting, it slows the SATA detection process down every time. When I boot the system without that HDD plugged in, it boots up like normal, in about 30 seconds to 1 minute.

When power is given to the 500 GB HDD, it spins up. It doesn't click. It does however stop spinning after about a minute or two probably after the headers are aligned.

I also would like to note that the drive smelled of a warm plastic-burning-like smell, though it was VERY faint, immediately after I took it out. The PCB looks fine; however, I'm not certain I'd be able to recognize a deformation of the chips if it was a small, hard to notice, one. Also, the PCB area heats up fairly quickly once it's plugged in, although it doesn't reach temperatures that would hurt you if you touched it.

System Specs:
AMD Phenom II X4 @ 3.3 GHz
8 GB of DDR3 Kingston RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6870
Windows 7 64-bit (installed on my 1 TB drive now)

My question, ultimately, is this: How might I get my data off this drive?

Obviously Professionals would be a last resort. I believe from all my research that it's the PCB that's bad. If the problem were internal, I don't believe it would spin up without some strange noise going off. And obviously the computer can sort of "see" the drive, otherwise it wouldn't sit on the "Auto-detect SATA" part for so long unless it thought something was there. This drive is 6 months old, so I'd probably have to change the firmware chip to the new PCB, if I could find one.

I would just like second opinions so I can hopefully make the right choice and successfully get my data back without spending too much time and money on this.

The data isn't "so" important, I can get most of it back, it would just take me ages to do so as most of the space was taken up and downloading 300 GB worth of stuff at 370 KB/s takes forever. Though there are pictures that are only on this drive that I would like back but aren't a necessity.

Pictures of the Drive and the PCB on it:

There is no way for us to really know what's wrong without a proper diagnosis. Sounds like it's probably a bad PCB given the fact sparks were flying out of it. Obviously, those blurry pictures are no help.

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Okay, well the sparks actually flew out of the connection between the 1 TB drive and the connector. NOT the 500 GB drive that's now broken. The 1 TB works fine.

Your Hitachi drive must have been affected by power surge while connecting your 1TB WD drive.

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