Hi!
I have a hard drive that died completely (no sound or comm.) after the charger caught fire, so I'm guessing a power surge is the culprit. I have gotten a matching donor following a donor guide over at donordrives[dot]com.

I moved the firmware chip from the old PCB to the donor PCB, then I combined the original hard drive with the donor PCB. The hard drive spins up, so that's nice. The only problem is that I cannot contact the hard drive.

Resources used:
- PCB replacement guide (where I got info on swapping the firmware chip): http://www.donordrives.com/pcb-replacement-guide
- Donor matching guide (what to look for in order to find a matching drive): http://www.donordrives.com/blog/matching-guide

The drives label:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3QEyvt-UdBSbVVDbmxGLWgzWUk

My setup:
- Hitachi HTS545050B9A300 500GB Hard drive
- USB / SATA adapter (ST-Lab U-390)
- Computer running Ubuntu 14.04

Symptoms:
- When I connect power to the hard drive, the drive spins up and I can hear a normal-sounding small clunk (I guess the heads unload).
- After that there is no head movement at all.
- fdisk -l and lsblk shown nothing
- reboot and enter BIOS, nothing
- When I disconnect power, the hard drive makes a faint and short, but distinct, beep. Does not sound like a fault or like it causes damage.

So, my question is this, does anyone have an idea of what's causing this and what steps are required to correct it?

Please provide photos of both pcbs.

Here are photos of the PCBs.

I'd also like to say that I tried the donor PCB on the original drive before swapping the ROM chip and the results were the same (spinning, but no head movement).

And I assume it was the U3 you moved?

Edit: Nevermind, I just saw you mentioned that as the caption to a picture.

I hope you didn't overheat the chip and cook it. Corrupted NVRAM will cause the drive to not spin up though, so if it's spinning it probably isn't that.

I'd say that the original issue was like SA related and has nothing to do with the PCB in the first place. Just a guess.

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

Hi! Thanks for the reply

Yeah, I tried not to overheat the IC while moving it. I think I did a decent job at it too :p

By SA, you mean Service Area, right? I'm still pretty new at this, but I want to learn.
Originally, the drive did not spin up. From my understanding, the problem had to be something other than the SA, at least originally, as it has to spin up to read the SA, right?

Please tell me if I got this all wrong.

Now, the drive spins up, makes one, maybe two, normal-sounding little clicks, then does f*** all, except spin.
The 1st click is definitely the heads un-parking (if thats the correct term), while the next click may be the drive trying to read the SA. There is so little action, that I'm not totally convinced that it even tries to read anything. If it tries to read the SA, it does not try again. I don't know if these are typical signs that the SA is not being read/readable? If so, is this typically due to a platter surface issue, or an issue related to the head stack?

Any thoughts?

Thanks to anyone taking the time to give me their hard earned knowlage.

Unless I'm missing something, you have moved the ROM (U3) and not the NVRAM (U6). The NVRAM MUST be moved, and that chip is delicate...

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

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Ah! I see. Now that I know the answer I was able to google it, which seems to confirm what you say. U6 should be swapped.

Article that seems to confirm your info: http://tierradatarecovery.co.uk/should-i-try-swapping-the-printed-circuit-board-on-my-failed-hard-drive

I'll try it out later today.

Thanks a lot

Yup! That solved the problem. =)

The disk is now recognized by Linux. I'm going to image it and recover the data.

As a first time poster on this forum, I'm impressed! Thanks a lot for helping out!

The hard drive is imaged and someone got their wedding photos back =)

Thank you guys!