Electrical damage / lightning / surges
Summary
Your drive has suffered some kind of electronic damage, whether that damage originated from a power surge, a blackout, lightning strikes, brownouts, or some other electronic failure of the drive’s electronic components over time. Sometimes you see the drive ‘let the smoke out’ or you smell the horrible burnt-electronics smell.
The Situation
Your drive has an electrical / PCB problem and no longer works due to some kind of electronic damage. This damage is often caused by lightning storms and strikes, power surges, blackouts, accidental shorting of the PCB, or brownouts. However, often for no obvious reason, a drive’s PCB / circuit board and other electronics can fail due to individual component failure. Sometimes this is due to overheating. Sometimes the chips or components have shorted and fried, but sometimes electrical components just fail with age.
In the old days, say, 15 years ago, sometimes you could just swap circuit boards from a same-model or same-firmware drive. For the most part, those days are long gone, as drive’s PCBs are often hard-coded such that they only work with the drive they came with. A simple PCB swap will almost never work without extra work on most modern drives, but if you try this on your own, please be sure to label both PCBs before making any changes and save the original PCB (even if the new one seems to take the drive farther in to a boot process). Though it’s not always the case, for some models, recovery is impossible without the original PCB so we definitely need you to supply us with the original PCB, even if it looks bad or seems to be worse than a replacement. Also, with some drives, like HGST / Hitachi drives, swapping PCBs with incompatible PCBs can make things worse, so we don’t advise trying if you don’t specifically know what to do or that what you will try is safe.
The Good News
At IT Data Recovery, we’ve successfully recovered thousands of drives that have failed due to electronic and PCB problems. These are usually still within our low-mid level pricing ranges, though we can never be sure how bad the situation is until we examine the drive. Also, often drives with failed circuit boards wind up being perfect recoveries, so we can sometimes even offer a perfect clone of the drive that might be able to be used as a boot drive again, which might save you from having to reinstall your OS from scratch and set everything back up the way you had it. We’ll let you know when this is an option after the evaluation.
The Solution
For the greatest chances and safest means of recovery, take your drive to the pros at IT Data Recovery. We carefully assess the situation, and pursue the recovery as safely as possible. Once the electronic problem has been patched/resolved, we make a clone of the bad drive before either performing the final customer clone, or the final recovery of the data onto a new secondary drive.