PLEASE HELP !! Seagate barracuda 250gigs 7200.8

doubt you will get the data back if you cant get the hdd to work

So I am confused, you were adding an HDD to his setup, where is his original HDD? You should just take out the new drive you tried to install ( and btw I have built like 30 PCs and I have never seen an HDD have smoke come out of it). The data from that drive is most likely lost. Next time save any files off the drive before you move it.

I still dont understand, how do you get sweet into a closed HDD cage. Most drives are inside a cage in the case. You had to pull the drive out for some reason. If you try to turn the PC on and nothing happens, you have fried his HDD. The ability to get the data will cost you more than buying a drive and starting over.

Got it. You have pretty much lost his HDD. You can install the other HDD and reload his operating system. I am assuming this is a Dell or HP and there should be a restore DVD that came with it.

The Seagate Barracuda 250 GigaByte is a reliable drive. Have purchased and deployed many of these over the decades. The new Seagate NFR hard disk drives have 3-D recording formats makes them most reliable and compatible with very high capacity Magneto-Optical drives. Back to User's situation: First have your hair dryer at ready, set it for warm (not hot) air to "air dry" the connectors and cables to the drive outside of the computer case. Let the drive sit at room temperature environment for two hours. This method works... used to dry my water logged Hurricane Katrina audio amplifier in 2005. Next find a known good and operational computer system. Set this problem Seagate Barracuda hard disk drive as "slave" or "secondary or SATA channel 1" and not to boot. Next check to see if Windows, Mac OS-X, UNIX, or Linux can recognize the drive. If user can view the drive's contents, actually navigate to read the files or document themselves-- then the user has better than 66% chance of getting access to the drive data. Because it is a Seagate hard disk drive, sometimes a retail boxed purchase includes something called "Sea Tools" which are Seagate hard disk drive utilities on a CD-ROM disc. And some versions also include some ancient DOS coding used to access the very aged and necessary file parameter tables that Windows operating systems use. Soetimes the user can access the drive that way. Now if any magnetic hard disk drive use any compression or encryption scheme-- will be much more difficult to recover! You may want to contact Seagate engineers--- they are very nice and helpful folks. Check their Customer Service areas at their website. Today there are only two hard disk drive manufacturers after the 2010, 2011, 2012 earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons in Asia. (Never place all your eggs in one area. We should be manufacturing the hard disk drives again in the USA.) Due to economic concerns... A few years back IBM sold their hard disk drive division to Hitachi and Hitachi bought Toshiba. Western Digital bought or merged with Hitachi last year. LGS (Lucky Gold Star) merged with Samsung and Seagate bought Samsung this year. Thus there are just two magnetic hard disk drive manufacturers remaining in the world. Have tried every type, class, format of affordable computer data storage media technology and the old "voice coil type" remains at the moment the most reliable, accessible, and cost effective. The USB-FlashROM memory and the Solid State Drives are the least reliable, not easy to setup, and most expensive. In the near future, try this-- install a operating system on the primary or first hard disk drive. Then add a second drive to be used only to store user documents, user database files. But the user must still re-install all Windows applications after a "wipe out" of a hard disk drive. Always keep the user data files, user archive documents on a separate physical hard disk drive (not another partition inside the same hard disk drive). Often a hard disk drive's electronic parts may be damaged or destroyed, but its data on the drive "platters" are still readablle, just can not access them the normal way. Thus many corporations spend a lot of money to find experts to disassemble the hard drive components without scratching the surface and without de-magnetizing the contents. Did this once, not too gracefully though. The rare earth electro magnets making up the read and write head assembly and the "voice coil" was difficult to separate. And then trying to find another "good" identical hard disk drive with the exact revision number indicating exact "electromagnetic" characteristics to match the same same exact spin rate, recording density, read-write permeabilities, and of course the little logic board must fit the same and run the same as the damaged drive. Just to open up the drive is bad ideal because the user will need to buy a rare "Secure Torx Wrench Set" which will probably be used only a few times. Even after successfully re-assembling all the components, how on earth is the user going to evacuate the air inside the hard disk drive. It supposed to be filled with pure nitrogen to prevent air particle contamination and collision inside the hard drive. Any dust particle hitting the drive platter surface at 5,400 rpm is detrimental to its data integrity. Hope this help to understand what is involved and how to approach the problem with a workable solution.

@Theopoli, you've got your mergers and acquisitions all wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_hard_disk_manufacturers#Acquisition.2Fmerger_charts_of_major_brands

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Digital
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST

http://ep.yimg.com/ca/I/yhst-44463692235217_2264_10118316

Check the two TVS diodes near the power connector. If one of them is shorted, just remove it.

BTW, you don't need to swap any firmware chip, provided that the boards have matching firmware.