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Old hard disk data recovery - swapped controller board, still nothing (SATA WD GREEN drive)

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First post, by Jed118

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Greetings all,

A friend of mine long ago put an incorrect adapter into his USB enclosed WD GREEN hard disk, blowing it up.

He gave me the drive recently so I took off the control board and I found one completely burned IC. Thinking in the 90s mode, I asked him to buy a similar drive on eBay so we can swap the controller board (a process I used often in the past with IDE drives) and carry on with a data recovery.

No.

Error - ng0QxnZl.jpg

Replacement drive:

fDgdYEDh.jpg

Replacement drive PCB:

FvWVNIhh.jpg

Original drive:

9nsDcZ9h.jpg?1

Original drive PCB:

jniVg1sh.jpg

nIiQpVwh.jpg

The only thing the drive does now is spin up, whereas before it was completely dead. I can see that some of the IC numbers are not the same, despite a 2 week difference in manufacture date.

I cleaned the contact points from the PCB to the drive pins on the replacement PCB (which were quite corroded) and tried a different SATA port but I still got the BIOS error.

Do I need to flash something here?

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 1 of 6, by luckybob

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Going from memory here, but you need to collect some data from the old pcb's firmware, and flash it to the new one.

How? No clue, never done it.

Side note: When the hell did a 750gb drive become OLD?

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

Reply 2 of 6, by Jed118

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2008, not exactly old. Granted I only have 3 Tb on my server... This drive must have cost quite a bit back 11 years ago 😉

At the very least, it's not new! It's older than your join date - what have you done in the last decade? Hopefully more than sit on a shelf and collect dust 😜 😁

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

Reply 4 of 6, by DAVE86

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Aragorn wrote:

There is usually an EEPROM which contains calibration data. You will maybe need to swap the eeprom over onto the new PCB?

U1 SMOOTH chip is the spindle motor pwm/head preamp-servo controller stage. The external ROM location, U12 is not populated meaning the drive loads the rom adaptives from the 88i745 controller's internal rom. This drive model is prone to have the heads go bad after the pwm/servo ic blows up.
You would need to transfer rom contents the other PCB and maybe swap the heads with compatible ones (in a clean room laboratory of course) or replace the SMOTH chip with a same model and hope that the internal preamp and heads survived 😵

Reply 5 of 6, by Koltoroc

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luckybob wrote:

Side note: When the hell did a 750gb drive become OLD?

Years ago, when multi terabyte HDDs became widely available. Personally I consider everything below 8TB old and outdated now (exempting SSDz).

Reply 6 of 6, by Jed118

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Aragorn wrote:

.
You would need to transfer rom contents the other PCB and maybe swap the heads with compatible ones (in a clean room laboratory of course) or replace the SMOTH chip with a same model and hope that the internal preamp and heads survived 😵

I asked my friend if he wanted to go through with this, he said it would be too time consuming and if we were to take it to a lab and do a recovery to swap heads, it would likely be too expensive. He doesn't even know what's on the drive, and doesn't miss it.

On the shelf it goes, in case one of us wins the lottery 😉

Thank you guys for your help in this matter.

Youtube channel- The Kombinator
What's for sale? my eBay!

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