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Is there an odd smell to the drive?
If it doesn't spin do you here a slight or faint ticking sound?
Does the BIOS see the hard drive?
Does the BIOS see the hard drive as the correct model?
Are there funny characters showing on boot?
Does the operating system blue screen?
Important things you should be aware of before you do anything to a suspected failed
hard drive
Static discharge will kill a hard drive when handling... especially the internal components
Dust will destroy your data... DO NOT OPEN! In my experience I see so many hard
drives destroyed by helpful neighbors when the problem was not situated internal of the
hard drive assembly. Just because it clicks doesn't always represent an internal failure.
Swapping the electronics runs the risk of further damage, especially if the revision
number of the PCB is different. You will have a greater success of data recovery with
less risk if the original electronics is repaired.
The Printed Circuit Board controls many functions to operate the hard disk drive, There
are 5 main features of a the electronics that can be unique to each drive that is likely to
fail, the first being:
POWER INPUT
The most problems we see here are mostly human era... forcing the power plug
in the wrong way
Unfortunately apart from a few notebook PCB's there is no protection fuse to
prevent PCB Damage
There is also risk of power surges making it through to the electronics as well
FIRMWARE
Firmware is unique to the PCB this controls calibration and track information so it
is very rare to be able to interchange the same model PCB with one that has
another firmware revision... so what this means, if your board shorts out the
firmware unique to the drive, you will be in trouble. Of course a good main
stream data recovery company will be able to replace this and manually
reprogram this chip
SPINDLE IC
This controls the speed and rotation of the spindle rotating the platters internal
to the hard drive assembly or HDA
These intend to get very hot at times and can often short out… The most famous
of models to this was the good old quantum LCT, particularly the TDA5247HT
