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PCB stands for 'Printed Circuit Board'. Hard drive has its very own 'mother board' (same principle as computers).

Do Not Swap Circuit Board on Hard Drive If you Care about Data

If you ask any professional data recovery specialist about swapping circuit boards on drives - the answer always will be the same: Under any circumstances do NOT try swapping the circuit board on damaged, faulty hard drive with the one taken from another drive.

Technically, if you do NOT care much about data and willing to take chances to experiment, you need to find the identical model of the failed hard drive and try PSB swapping.

Yes, in some exceptional cases it might work, but for the certain hard disk models only. All other (95+ %) of hard drives will start clicking, or simply fail to be recognized by computer.

Replacing the printed circuit board may very well cause a mechanical failure and render your salvageable data to unrecoverable. Moreover, switching boards do not work in most cases. The explanation to this is quite simple, if you are a professional data recovery engineer: the drive information carried on its controller board is unique for each particular drive for certain models; other models required certain firmware version, matched chipset on board, site code, and so on.

Why is some firmware on PCB unique and practically makes the hard disk unrecoverable if it happens the original board is missed or lost? That's because some drives fail to start if the tiny piece of microcode on PCB is not matched with the identical data on the spinning hard disk inside the drive.

Before shipping your hard drive for data recovery:
MAKE SURE the failed/damaged hard drive has its original PCB on it. Regardless the PCB condition, e.g. missed/burned elements on it, the hard drive must have its own original board.

Needless to say that our lab is well equipped to repair hard drive and bring it up to the shape, when data reading is available from the disk. When is required, our specialists re-solder elements on the board (including main processor microchip), re-program ROM, and restore firmware microcode. As that is all part of the data recovery process by professionals.

A few notes before we start recovery

Do not try to swap the board before data is recovered. If you have already swapped a PCB, but did not succeed to access the data, return the original board on the drive.


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Seagate ST5000DM000 PN: 1FK178-568 Problem:
Failure occurred during a transfer of files from the stricken drive to a backup drive. SMART errors detected, and the drive is now unable to be detected by computer and other recovery tools. Attempt to recover by partition cloning to a 4TB drive was failed. Cloned drive was failed during the middle of the process, at which point the drive cannot be properly detected by the computer. Request: There are three partitions on the stricken drive. All data in Partition 1 and Partition 2 are most important. Partition 3 is less important, and can be considered if it can be recovered without additional cost. I would prefer partition cloning rather than data recovery as it is lesser stress on the drive. The new drive obtained is 4TB with 4 partitions. Partition 4 is in use only. Partition 1 may have some hidden data from an attempted but failed partitioned HDD-clone, it can be wiped to facilitate backup efforts. During backup process, please use the first three partitions on the backup drive in the same order as the stricken drive (first two get priority).
A+ service Richmond Hill, Ontario

Recover 1.0TB WD10JMVW crashed hard drive
I did try to use the Hard Disk Test on my HP laptop and got an Error log: Hard Disk failed with failure ID PGAM70-.., description Hard Disk 1. I hope the physical condition of the hard disk is not beyond your ability to fix the problem and retrieve data and files of it.
Perfect result, your assistance is invaluable. IT specialist in Toronto

Error reading hard drive - MQ01ABB200
When the laptop suddenly slowed down, the technician ran the hard drive test. Apparently the test passed and problem was seemingly found and repaired, bad sectors found and re-mapped. However, in less than an hour we found out that repairing made the bigger problem with access to data. It looks like something stuck inside the drive (probably the spindle seizure or heads sticking to the platters). We did not have a chance to save all what we need to backup storage.
Perfect result of your recovery services. NYC