The first drive works perfectly, the other 3 spin, but are not seen by the SAS Controller card... When you switch any of the pcbs from the damaged drive to the one working drive, the pcbs work fine, which indicates that they did not get damaged. They had some power surges which created the problem. Originally I thought it could be a pcb issue, but apparently not, because we switch the pcbs to the only working drives and it worked no problem.. any ideas?

Don't play around with somebody's server data. Contact a local data recovery lab you trust and have them assess the drives before it is too late.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Thanks for sharing that...

Perhaps if you could able to provide more detailed information of those drives (e.g. make, model, configuration) some professionals in this forum might be able to give you some light and provide you a decent help.

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Encryption is a powerful defensive weapon for free people.
It offers a technical guarantee of privacy, regardless
of who is running the government - E. Dyson

Does the drive come up in SAS Controller with Model, Serial number, capacity or any junk charecters or none of the 3 drives detected at all?
Faulty drive Spinning is normal as the 1st working one or any scratching noise is observed in any of those drives?

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Did you perform any other diagnostics besides that?
Among basic things to do it would be useful to carefully record the sounds non-working drives make when started with their original boards and share those recordings anyhow.

BTW, (the question is obvious, but still...) the controller you're using, is it a separate one, I mean it wasn't affected by the power surge anyhow?

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• Remote RAID, NAS, SAN, VMware, DVR (CCTV), flash and tape recovery. Data recovery support.

So let me get this straight, you have 4 drives.

You have 3 working ones.

You put a possibly bad PCB on the working ones?

Why would you risk the 3 remaining working drives, that seems irresponsible to me. I would be spitting like a Cobra if someone started doing things like that to any of my servers.

I would be taking Lukes advice.