Need help recovering missing data after transplanting replacement hard drive PCB

[csnyphoto]

I am new to this forum and I need help very badly! I have a question about recovering data from a 1TB Hitcahi Deskstar (P/N 0A38016) hard drive of mine that crashed. Basically I had Hitcahi Deskstar hard drive that started doing the click of death, so I purchased another 1TB Deskstar (with the same model number and that was made two months after mine) as a donor in hopes of doing a transplant. Once I received the donor hard drive I tested it by writing some files onto it and deleting them to make sure that it worked properly (and it did).

I began the transplant by swapping the PCBs on each hard drive. When I did, the clicking noise miraculously stopped as the original drive powered up flawlessly and the clicking noise started on the donor drive (which confirmed that the PCB was in fact defective). I was very thankful that it was only the PCB that was defective and not the read/write head.

The next step that I took was that I swapped and soldered the ROM/NVRAM chips so that the original hard drive with the donor’s PCB ended up with its original ROM/NVRAM chip. I was ecstatic when my original hard drive was detected by my computer after being powered up but my heart dropped when I saw that the entire hard drive (that had 998GBs of irreplaceable files on it) was empty.

I have run two data recovery programs (Recuva and Puran File Recovery) on it since and have become even more confused. The two programs recovered only about 68 files, which were unexplainably the files that I had originally written to the donor hard drive while testing it out. Somehow, files that I had written to the donor hard drive and then deleted were being detected on the original drive after I swapped the PCBs. This doesn’t make any sense…

How could files from the donor hard drive show up on the original hard drive? Is there any data stored in the PCBs? And more importantly, how do I attempt to recover the data from my original hard drive? Is there any hope of data recovery since I have not formatted or written any files over my original hard drive? Are there any programs that you could suggest that might work?

In closing, I wanted to make it known that while I have certainly learned my lesson since this happened (as I have cloned all of my hard drives so I will never be in this position again), I would still really love to recover the priceless files that were on the defective hard drive. I welcome any advice that you might have for me to help me find those files.

Thanks,

Chris

 

[Elixer]

Priceless files ?
Then you shouldn't be messing around with the HD *at all*.
Take it to the pros, and it will cost lots of $$$.

The PCB EEPROMs don't store anything file related, but each PCB EEPROM has special info about he HD itself. This is why a PCB swap doesn't usually work, unless pretty much everything is exactly the same both on the HD and the PCB.

It almost sounds like you just did a recover on the HD you wrote the test files on, and not the one that had issues.
Click of death is usually always hardware related.
I would say give testdisk a shot, but again, if the data is priceless, don't mess with it, take it to the professional recovery service.

 

[fzabkar]

The data recovery professionals have already told you that your idea is impossible.

Locate your NVRAM chip here:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_EEPROM_Flash.html

You will probably find that its capacity is about 4K bits. Not much at all ...

The SDRAM is the only other memory device, but it is volatile. That is, all its cached data is lost when you switch off the power.

I am still prepared to help you identify the patient and donor components, but you need to indulge me by providing date codes.

For example, there will be a YYWW (Year / Week) date code on the PCB near the motor connector, and there will be a Month-Year date code at the top right corner of the label on the metal cover. Each IC will also have YYWW date codes, or their Japanese versions.

See this example:
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/2444/htd721010sla360.jpg

There is an "0842" code near the motor connector, and an "0843" on the LSI MCU.

 

[csnyphoto]

So I figured out that somehow I ended up switching the identification labels that I put on each of the hard drives while operating on them, and I basically did the PCB swap on the wrong hard drive (the donor drive). So the data that I recovered was indeed the data that I had written and deleted from the donor hard drive as a test and wasn’t from the original hard drive that I was trying to recover.

I then discovered that the original hard drive was the hard drive that was still making the click of death and that the donor hard drive was the hard drive that was still functioning properly; I now knew that the PCB swap had not fixed it.

I figured that the problem was with the heads so I went on to do a transplant of the heads: putting the donor head in the original hard drive and putting the original head in the donor hard drive. But I did not succeed. It went from one head malfunctioning to two heads malfunctioning. I think that I might have damaged the good head during the transplant due the extreme difficulty of removing the head due to the strength of the neodymium magnets.

Also when I had the original hard drive open, I noticed that there were two rings on the top hard drive platter, which appear to have been from the head coming in contact with the platter and leaving a scoring mark. I realized that if I were to even get the hard drive functioning properly again that I will definitely be facing some sort of data loss. So I will now be sending the hard drive to a professional data recovery company and hoping for the best. Thanks to everyone that posted an answer!

Chris

 

[fzabkar]

Best of luck, but I reckon Kroll OnTrack is your only hope.

 

[tomt4535]

If you opened the top cover of the hard drive outside of a cleanroom environment, I wouldn't expect to get any of that data back. Any little spec of dust or fingerprint on the platters will ruin it. Replacing the guts inside a hard drive is not something the average computer technician should do, ever. Lessons learned here should be to backup your data regularly and to pay a professional recovery service as soon as you notice the drive going bad.

 

[fzabkar]

The following advice applies in the general case, but not in the case of a head crash, as is the OP's situation.

If you opened the top cover of the hard drive outside of a cleanroom environment, then, if you wish to persist with DIY, and as long as you didn't touch the platters, you can purge the loose contaminants from the platters as follows.

Place a business card between the PCB and the HDA contacts. Then let the drive will spin up. This will give the air turbulence more time to blow any dust off the platters. If the motor remains spinning, then let it spin as long as possible. If it spins down, then keep spinning it up until you feel confident that the HDA has been purged of contaminants.

If the drive doesn't spin, then it may be that the MCU needs to see the preamp. In this case you could mask off the two voice coil contacts on the HDA connector with insulation tape. You could even use a donor PCB for this.

Years ago I used to routinely follow such a practice when mopping up the debris after a head crash. It gave me peace of mind just in case I missed something.

Of course the above procedure is only applicable for those cases where there has been no head crash. In my case I was referring to 30-year old drives where the disc pack was removeable and where the data were given up for lost.