Do NOT Try to Swap the Circuit Board

Before Manufacturers Started Making ‘Intelligent’ Hard Drives, Replacing the Circuit Board Did Sometimes Work:

• However, newer drives (less than 10yrs old) have one (or more) microchips embedded on the circuit board containing "adaptive data"
• This adaptive data includes information about the hard drive's heads, its firmware version, any bad sectors, and more
• This information is unique to the hard drive the circuit board is attached to – swapping the circuit board may get a hard drive spinning again, but it will probably not provide access to the user data area of the hard drive
• The only way to successfully replace a circuit board is to transfer the adaptive data from the original ‘bad’ circuit board to the new, ‘good’ circuit board
• Even then, if the original circuit board failed as a result of an electronic failure, then the new circuit board will fail too, unless that electronic failure is identified and repaired
• Either way, swapping a circuit board is technically complex and should be left to a data recovery professional