Today has been a wonderful day until my boss brought me her laptop. A HP laptop with water damage. The laptop itself is done but I am trying to see if there is any chance for the hard drive. It is a Samsung ST1000LM024, it doesn't appear to have any water damage to it. top is clean, sides, maybe one of the bottom screw holes looks like it could have the beginning to some water residue on it, bottom pcb looks clean. I plugged it in to see what is going on and it does nothing. No sounds, no activity on computer, nothing which is telling me pub according to everything I have been reading (by the way great forum here). I am not knowledgeable enough to know what to look for but I have my multimeter ready for instructions. Images are attached. To me it looks like a diode could be burned but would like some expert thoughts. Thanks!

My guess is that the heads are stuck to the platters, which is quite common for this series of drive. Do not open the drive to see and try to fix it yourself, unless you do not care about the risk of making it a lot worse and unrecoverable. Your best bet is to have the drive assessed by a data recovery professional (not your local computer tech) while the cost of recovery is likely to be affordable.

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Luke
Recovery Force Donor Inventory: 5,000+ Fully Cataloged HDDs & Growing

Measure the voltages in the attachments. If all else fails, then transfer the "ROM" to a donor PCB, if necessary.

You can obtain a diagnostic report via the drive's serial port as follows.

How to connect a terminal cable on a Samsung drive ?
http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php? ... 189&p=6926

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Measurements are:
V1: 1.81
V2: 2.49
Vcore: 1.01
+5Vin: 5.32
+5V filtered: 5.29

The voltages all look good. The terminal log should confirm whether you have a stiction case. Putting your ear against the cover as the drive tries to spin may also confirm this.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.