Hi,
I'm trying to save HDD for a friend. It's not showing up in BIOS, but if I touch it I can feel it vibrate so it's spinning up and it doesn't make any weird noises. I've taken out the PCB to inspect it and found some kind of residue/marks on the connector:



As you can see the bottom part of the connector is normal silver color, but to top part looks burnt or something. Everything else about the PCB looks perfect.

Should I try to scrub the connector with isopropyl alcohol or something? What you guys think?

Thats kind of normal with these WDs, you can clean the contacts with eraser & see if it makes a difference. But I don't think it will help. What happened to the drive?

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030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH (Germany)
HDD, SSD, NAS, RAID Datenrettung - 030-datenrettung.de

According to my friend (the owner) it just stopped booting one day, that's all. The drive is 2yrs old. I am toying with the idea of swapping PCB, but it's kinda hard to find one. Is there anything I can try? The HDD is dead anyway so I'm willing to try even the most ghetto methods to recover the data on the cheap. I'm thinking about tossing it in the oven for a couple of minutes (yeah I know, but I've tried it with dead GPUs a couple of times and it actually works 50-70% of time ).

yes, as mentioned by "pcn" clean it gently with eraser and see if helps or not.
am afraid problem is not with pcb.

good luck

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Data Recovery Pakistan

Oxidisation on Western Digital PCBs:
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... 649&p=1789

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

If it's spinning it should not be pcb related, so a swap will do nothing but drive might start to click with a different pcb without rom transfer. Putting it in the oven will not help, it might damage pcb and internal components. If drive is spinning and not detected in BIOS it's rather a problem with drives firmware / SA, weaks heads and/or media damage. You need special tools to solve such problems, sorry.

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030 Datenrettung Berlin GmbH (Germany)
HDD, SSD, NAS, RAID Datenrettung - 030-datenrettung.de

Yeah I did the oven trick but it didn't help. Guess my friend is not getting his photos back lol. Ordered SSD for him and at least he'll learn to use OneDrive from now on

Thanks for your responses guys!

Well,
Very Rarely Have i Had a Case that Worked After Cleaning .But Few Days Back Had a Samsung Old IDE That Worked Just Due To This .I decided To Take Just 40 USD For The Job

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com