A broken hard drive, identifying the problem

[MidoBan]

Hi, my hard drive started making clicking noises and then stopped working. It is unrecognizable by the PC, and i want to recover some of the data.
As i understand it, it could be a physical problem inside the HDD or a circuit board problem, in that case, i can just replace the circuit board.
How can i know which of the two is the problem?

My HDD is an Hitachi HDS722512VLSA80. If its a circuit board problem, i'll need to get a new board, but i didn't find any separate boards for this exact model, i only found the HDD itself on ebay. I assume that getting only the board is cheaper but i can't seem to find it.

Thanks

 

[PhilFrisbie]

It is likely the board by itself is more expensive!

 

[mightymaxio]

Unless you know exactly what your doing, and i mean have a masters in computer engineering. I wouldnt mess with it, you may end up damaging the hard drive and loosing everything. There is a reason the service usually costs between 2-5 thousand dollars. A clicking sound is more likely a motor than anything, the mechanical head could be off as well. Anything where you have to disasemble the harddrive would need to happen in a completely 100% sterle environment free from dust or else a dust particle could scratch the disk effectively killing any chance of recovery.

If you want to try a program approach use Hdat2 to recover errors with the hard drive then use diskdigger to pull information from the hard drive. Disk digger works even if windows doesnt recognise the diskdrive.

Hope this helps.

 

[MidoBan]

Unless you know exactly what your doing, and i mean have a masters in computer engineering. I wouldnt mess with it, you may end up damaging the hard drive and loosing everything. There is a reason the service usually costs between 2-5 thousand dollars. A clicking sound is more likely a motor than anything, the mechanical head could be off as well. Anything where you have to disasemble the harddrive would need to happen in a completely 100% sterle environment free from dust or else a dust particle could scratch the disk effectively killing any chance of recovery.

If you want to try a program approach use Hdat2 to recover errors with the hard drive then use diskdigger to pull information from the hard drive. Disk digger works even if windows doesnt recognise the diskdrive.

Hope this helps.

Disk digger sounds like a good idea, but i don't understand how does it work even if windows doesn't recognize the HDD? how can i pick a drive to recover from if its not visible?

 

[fzabkar]

It does sound like an internal fault rather than a PCB problem.

In any case, you can't just replace the PCB and expect it to work. You need to transfer the board's "adaptive" data to your donor. These data are stored in an 8-pin "NVRAM" chip. Your local TV/AV repair shop should be able to do this for you.

See http://www.datarecoverytools.co.uk/2009/12/11/nvram-and-nvram-repair/

 

[MidoBan]

It does sound like an internal fault rather than a PCB problem.

In any case, you can't just replace the PCB and expect it to work. You need to transfer the board's "adaptive" data to your donor. These data are stored in an 8-pin "NVRAM" chip. Your local TV/AV repair shop should be able to do this for you.

See http://www.datarecoverytools.co.uk/2009/12/11/nvram-and-nvram-repair/

Oh, well that's news to me..
I assumed i only need to replace the board according to this instructional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoVBHG4kajA
They don't say anything about the "NVRAM" chip.

 

[fzabkar]

Read some threads at HDD Guru:
http://www.google.com/search?q=hitachi+nvram+site:hddguru.com

 

[MidoBan]

Read some threads at HDD Guru:
http://www.google.com/search?q=hitachi+nvram+site:hddguru.com

Yeh i already read some since your post, i see that it's necessary in order to repair the HDD.
But still, it just seems weird to me because the video i posted is made by some kind of repair shop/lab. It's odd that they didn't mention it.

Thanks for the tip.