HDD Clicking and not showing in My Computer?

wonderer

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Hi all. I recently found an old Maxtor Fireball 3 40GB drive. It was from my very first pc so I am intrigued as to what is on it, old photos etc. It had a burnt chip on top and was completely dead so I have replaced the PCB with the exact same model/serial numbers etc and now the drive runs but with a rhythmic clicking. Sometimes it runs quietly for a few minutes and then starts clicking and then repeats the process. I am using a HDD Dock via USB and Windows 10 if that makes a difference although it is the same issues on a Win XP Pc I also have.

The drive is showing in BIOS and in both Disk Management and Device Manager however it is not showing in My Computer and in Disk M it shows as 0GB and says "no media" I can change the drive letter but this does nothing. The drive also does not show up in SeaTools or any partition manager I have tried.

I wont be paying for professional data retrieval as like I say, it is only curiosity as to whats on it more than anything but I also would like to exhaust all possibilities down the DIY route before I throw it away.

I have researched and researched this the last three days but everything I have read either has no solution or does not relate.

Any ideas anyone?
 
The controller often has bad sectors mapped out during manufacturing so that alone could stop it working.
 
Modern drives and I use the word loosely with yours do indeed share the same circuit boards in the model however there is an ic that is encoded with that individual drives details.This varies even between drives of the same model, without the information on this chip the drive will not work properly.

The only way to get a drive to work is to transplant the ic from old board to new one. As you can imagine is non trivial. I did it using a precision soldering iron on a 2tb drive, in this case it was a seven leg chip and I ended up doing it two or three times back and forthfor various reasons. It's not for the faint heated.

If the burnt out chip is the one you need then unless you send in for forensic recovery it's unlikely to work.

There are also companies that will so the chip changing service for you. A quick Google should bring them up
 
Thanks for the quick replies guys. Hmmmmm sounds like there is not much to do. Annoying as the drive is still alive so I know the data is there somewhere, its just that its not important enough to warrant paying through the nose to get it..............but I wanna know whats on there!!!!! :D

I have nothing to lose with the drive so think I will try the freezer idea tonight and if no luck there I think I may even......wait for it, try and transplant the platter as I have an exact same HDD sat here of no use. I know this is as good as the kiss of death but like I say, I have nothing to lose . Anyone think there is an outside chance this may work?
 
Hmm.... no.
 
BTW the freezer trick was for early Sky cards that had cheap flash memory in them.
 
Missed trollslayers original post. It's not just bad sectors it's the physical drive characteristics too so where the disk actually starts etc.

Swapping platters is a kiss of death as unless you have a clean room and the right tools and precisely how to take it apart you generally screw disks opening them let alone moving platters.

You still have the problem then the new drive has the wrong characteristics.much easier to desolder ic and do it that way.

Where the freezer method come from as even if it worked it would have to be reprogrammed
 

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