Hi all,
I have made an acount on these forums because I have a problem with a harddrive : Hitachi Deskstar HTD722516DLA380 164GB
It was part of a small home server and i used to backup my pictures to it.
Somehow I ended up with a great deal of my wedding pictures on the HDD and not anywhere else ;(

I think the problem started when I accidentally pressed the power button at the front of the PC-case a couple of times.
After that a clicking sound was heard from the HDD and it wasn't recognized anymore.

I found a replacement PCB on ebay with matching labels on the front. (same P/N, MLC, CHS and LBA numbers)
I hoped for a quick fix but swapping didn't have much effect.

Connected the HDD via a SATA-USB cable to a laptop. With the old PCB the HDD made the clicking sound. With the "new" PCB the drive spins up, and stays spinning. No clicking. But is doesn't appear on my laptop. Obviously something isn't right.

I read om some forums a chip replacement could work. I made a picture of the old and new.

What to do? Is there a chance of repairing it this way or will it make my problems worse? Ultimately i could bring it to a special repair shop, but thats very costly.

kind regards

Clicking is usually a sign of some internal failure, but in rare cases a bad PCB can cause it.

Either way, the circled chip DOES need to be swapped over. It's the NVRAM and contains pretty much unique info including the starting location of the SA.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Ok, i will give it a shot with swapping the chips. Hopefully it wil work

Don't hold your breath about it working. I'd take 100 to 1 odds that its the read /write heads that have failed.

Plus keep on mind that if you ruin that nvram chip, your data is gone forever. Even the professionals may not be able to recover it.

_________________
Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

mmm, thanks for the warning. That does shed some different light on my actions.
I think i will be better safe than sorry, and contact a data retrieval centre for a diagnosis.