I got really lucky one day in October 2020 with a data recovery. I was challenged when I discovered a hard drive I was handling had short circuited, and failed to power on. I did my best to diagnose the short by removing the HDD and testing the PCB with a multimeter. After research and testing, which was uncertain because the multimeter wasn't giving me a lot of confidence, I successfully removed one, and then the other of the two TVS diodes on the PCB.

They were really easy to spot because it was an old drive with large diodes.

I used a primitive wide barrel heat gun and metal tools to wrench the TVS diodes free, and one split apart on me.

In the end, I was successful, and I managed to get the drive to power on with an external SATA adapter and successfully mount, and backup all the data overnight.