On a severe Hail Mary, I tried taking the circuit board off a no longer functioning hard drive that I had in my multi media storage server that had just died recently. I have a screw driver kit that fit the 6 point star pattern screws on the drive so since there were some hints of maybe bad contact, I figured nothing to loose but some time.
took out the screws on the circuit board carefully pulled it away from the bottom of the drive as not to rip the foam padding between the surfaces used a pencil eraser (soft) to clean the discolored contacts on either side of the board and carefully reassembled the drive.
Shockingly it is back from the click of death that it was doing before I tried this. Now I wouldn't recommend continued use of a once failed drive but I have another a 2tb that I wasn't able to pull data from about 8 years ago that I just tried the same on and am pulling data successfully from to a backup drive as I write this (and at a surprisingly good speed too).
Just thought it was some usefull info. if you drop a drive, this won't work. has nothing to do with physical damage. but sometimes drives just stop working, and this might just get you a chance to get you data like I seem to have.
