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I came across a hard drive that was a good candidate to try and switch out the printed circuit board. My client had very valuable information that she needed, but was not willing to pay a firm like drivesavers over a $1000 to get here data. This was a SATA drive that was spinning with a healthy sound, but it would not show up in the bios or with a sata-to-usb connector. It appeared that the circuit board had gone bad. We found the same drive with the same firmware version(I think they have to be the same) as the bad drive(in Great Britain). We put the new circuit board on the unworking drive. We did not have any luck with getting the data, the drive still would not be recognized on the hardware level. Their must be other electronics other then the visible circuit board that may have went bad.

Since we had the two matching drives, we did an experiment. We wrote data to the good drive. We then removed the circuit board from the good drive we just wrote data to. Then we installed the circuit board from the failed drive to the drive we just wrote data to. We were still able to read all the data. It was kind of a fun experiment.

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I came across a hard drive that was a good candidate to try and switch out the printed circuit board. My client had very valuable information that she needed, but was not willing to pay a firm like drivesavers over a $1000 to get here data. This was a SATA drive that was spinning with a healthy sound, but it would not show up in the bios or with a sata-to-usb connector. It appeared that the circuit board had gone bad. We found the same drive with the same firmware version(I think they have to be the same) as the bad drive(in Great Britain). We put the new circuit board on the unworking drive. We did not have any luck with getting the data, the drive still would not be recognized on the hardware level. Their must be other electronics other then the visible circuit board that may have went bad.

Since we had the two matching drives, we did an experiment. We wrote data to the good drive. We then removed the circuit board from the good drive we just wrote data to. Then we installed the circuit board from the failed drive to the drive we just wrote data to. We were still able to read all the data. It was kind of a fun experiment.

That's interesting.

Which circuit board are you referring to?

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Given your description I would say that confirms that the circuit board is good and it is something more.

Have you tried putting the drive on a lazy susan (you know the thing you put food on that spins around so you can access it from all sides) and quickly spin it back and forth? This often will free a read head which has jammed because it thrashed back and forth to quickly and got stuck in the old parking zone or its modern day equivalent.

By drive not recognized on hardware level; are you saying it will not show in bios? Or does it show there but not in device manager? Or just not in my computer?

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I meant it did not even show up in the bios. With that said, my memory might be incorrect. It may have shown up, when viewing the bios setup, but did not display the proper drive information.

When using the sata-to-usb connector, it once showed up as a usb device(don't remember the exact term used). But it would not show up as a mass storage device in either "My Computer" or "Computer Management". After that, it would not even show up as any usb device when I plugged it in. It was completely unresponsive.

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