I need to recover some data, but am not sure how dead my drive is.

Recently my system froze, then would fail to find my Hitachi T7K500 400GB SATA hard drive (and of course wouldn't boot). It happened immediately after I plugged in a USB flash drive that I'd used many times before (on Vista).

Then I did something really stupid. I tried to plug the hard drive into another system, but did this WITH THE POWER ON. I know these aren't hot-swappable, but I had a momentary lapse of reason. The hard drive and power wire emitted smoke and some plastic melted. Following this, the hard drive would not spin up or be recognized by the BIOS.

I purchased a functional identical hard drive (same model, same part number, capacity, same manufacture month, factory) and transferred the PCB board to my dead drive. Now, it spins up, but the system BIOS won't recognize it.

Can I recover the data using software? I am thinking this may not be possible, since the BIOS on multiple systems won't detect the drive.

Perhaps the electrical damage extends beyond the PCB board to the heads. If this is the case, I probably need to transfer them from the duplicate drive I purchased. I have a dust-free biosafety cabinet I can use, but really I would like to avoid opening up the drive.

Any advice would be much appreciated! Cheers.

And yes, I am now making regular backups...

Avoiding opening the drive is a very good idea. You could have fried the head stack preamp, or perhaps the board wasn't a good enough match. I'm not too familiar with these, so I don't know if there's any adaptives that needs to be copied or unsoldered. If the drive isn't recognized, software won't do it.

If u hdd reach readiness DRDY DSC, but when u tried to access any sector u get ERR ABRT; its an mismatching between PCB microcode and SA that´s happend many times when u did a PCB exchange on this models . we get many cases with this syntomph

and maybe doenst need to did a head swap !
send me pm

Best Regards

Sinceraly

Alberto

Hi,

if the drive doesn't emit clicking sound, there's no need for a head swap.
Hopefuly an NVRam swapping will do the job.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery