[dw1]

Funny you should ask.

My main workstation PC at home had a HDD that went belly-up this past Saturday evening. Just a quick b"blue screen of death" then nothing. The o/s no longer recognizes the drive, although the BIOS seems to.

I connected the drive to another PC via a SATA-USB cable and also...nothing. I can hear it vibrating, but I suspect the motor, head assembly or HDD PCB went bye-bye.

It sure sounds like you have a HDD that had a latent failure due to the drop, and it took a bit more running for it to show up. DON'T run the drive more, or you risk further damage.

I'm an experienced computer guy since the days of the 6800 and 8086, but I will not attempt HDD internal hardware failure repair myself.

HDD software failures due to viruses, corrupt files, etc. - sure I'll fix those. I've even repaired drives that were progressively failing, but taking the readable data to another drive.

But HDD internal hardware failures - no.

Firstly, a PCB replacement requires the EXACT same drive (even the firmware needs to be the same) and some extreme skills hand-soldering what was originally done by machine. (Ever try hand soldering an SMT component? Not impossible, but extremely close to it.

Second, I don't have a class 100 (or better) clean room with ESD control that is required to open up a HDD.

If you need the data, bite the bullet and send the drive to one of the many organizations that specialize in data recovery. If you don't need the data, just get a new drive, start from scratch, and remember to frequently back up your data on an external drive of other archive media frequently.

BTW, my failed drive appears identical to the one pictured in the Wikipedia entry "data recovery".