I think 'ignore Bernard' is a bit strong - his advice is sound.

That's not to say that a successful fix may be found but hard disk drives are electro-mechanical devices, and whilst they are inherently very reliable they are certainly not 100% reliable.

Bearings fail, capacitors dry out, resistors go high...the list goes on. And on.

Any commercial user would simply not risk relying on a drive that has failed - even if it has been repaired. The cost of a replacement drive on the average home machine is not really prohibitive.

I'm assuming that it's the drive that has failed and it's not a motherboard fault!

IMHO go with Bernard's suggestion of replacing the drive whilst continuing to try to revive the old drive....and if indeed you are fortunate enough to get the thing to fly again, copy the information over to your new drive.

Good luck with it!

John