MiRaD wrote:
Any further "pointers" would be greatly appreciated.
Personally I'm concerned about trusting the previous diagnosis, without getting further information.
MiRaD wrote:
She has the machine in for repair and they have told her the PCB is shot
Did she (or you) get any further details about exactly which part of the PCB is "shot", in their opinion? Unfortunately we have seen people post here, where a PC repairer has mis-diagnosed an internal drive fault as being a PCB problem.

Therefore I suggest that you post the
actual symptoms of the drive - how exactly is the drive behaving? (e.g. does it spin-up when power is applied? does it stay spinning? any abnormal noises like clicking? is the drive make / model / capacity reported correctly in the BIOS disk setup screen? was this previously an external drive? etc. etc.), and also give a brief history of what happened just before this problem started, as well as a list of what tests and diagnosis has been done already, with a list of the results of each test.
Just a suggestion...