New shop, new intro and logo you’re doing well. Love your content, keep up the good work 😊 Start regretting all the old stuff I threw away 6 years ago 😂
Graham, you are one of the most gifted techs on you tube. I don't understand why your subscriptions are as low as they are. When compared to someone like Cary Holzman who doesn't have a shadow of the talent as you do. He spends most of his time on begging for money than he does on computer repair. Rant over! Keep up with the great videos.
@Mr Guru This sounds very disrespectful and tells me more about you than it does about Holzman, chances are none of these people are gifted, they spend time with stuff and get results because of this, Graham isn't some demi-god that descended from the skies, he's just like us. Also keep in mind how much it helps other people to see Holzman build stuff, debug PC's etc.
@Mr Guru I understand, I just wanted to share my thoughts, calling people names will just make them not want to have a discussion, I've been on the internet long enough to see where this goes, I wish you the best.
Good save there Graham. Clear and concise, with no waffle with nothing to sell. Like the new titles/logo. Shop is looking good as well. Keep up great work.
You are my computer repairman hero!! You give me the confidence to try more difficult repairs. Still I'm not good at soldering, but always learn something from your videos. Keep up the good work Sir!
I swapped the boards of a failed IDE drive once 15-years ago and it worked fine, allowing me to copy my data off the drive. It failed a day later, but did let me grab my data so it was a success! You could restore the new board with the original ROM and put it back on the new drive, giving you a brand new one to use. As it hasn't even spun up, it should be fine to use.
This cheered me up after a bad day in the workshop with multiple component failure on massively thick PCBs with tiny surface mount everything on it and through hole sub-PCBs - this happened 3 times in a row with different devices. None of which got fixed.😭😭😭😭😭😭Wah!!! indeed. Sore eyes and fingers and headache and bad mood.
Thumbs up...researching my own data recovery of a family pic drive gone bad. I've sourced an "Identical" drive like you did. Fingers crossed. Thanks for your expertise in all thing tech related. disclaimers noted as well.
I actually recall your statement of "if components start getting blown around, then turn the air flow down". This was coming from someone who wasn't sure what the hell was going on when I first got my hotair station, the biggest suprise was how dam hot the PCB boards were getting, I was thinking this shit could fry an egg given the heat it gets to. I also think the distance from the board makes a difference, so you can decrease the airflow but put it closer and technically you should get the same effect, since if you take the air flow and the distance from the board as the frequency of how many hot air particles are traveling from the nozzle to the board then by decreasing the air flow and bringing the nozzle closer should keep the temperatures around the same.
i never had to but something i read is: rather than swapping chips one can get a same model/make working donor drive WITH THE SAME GEOMETRY, boot it up, hotswap the board to the driver to recover. what's going to be missing is mainly the negative sector data which is the SMART reports and the reallocated sector map plus some other things BUT the platter will spin and heads move and data flow.
Thanks Graham that was great. When you first started I said to myself just swop the board over why mess about with removing chips, then you answered and said it was that smaller chip that holds the way the drive has stored everything and just swapping the board won't work, it was like you heard me lol. I still have a couple of older drives that are not SATA connection, I keep meaning to look on them to see what is there, I have a drive dock with those connections on. Anyway Graham you did a good job and I'm sure the customer will be very happy, well done mate.
data recovery is a very interesting thing for me. Finding content on it is kinda difficult as people want to protect their methods. I've found a couple channels, but the uploads are sporadic
What fun :) I had the exact same chip (by smooth) going cactus yesterday and swapped it. That did the job. Those chips are more common that the chance of running into the exact same control board. Great to see you managed the fix :)
Use R studio for getting everything off the drive, and another brilliant piece of kit would be a pc3000 and a deepspar 4 DDI, I've used both when I was a data recovery technician
I do like u a lot dude. You are so down to earth. I like this way like you are. If i would live in the UK, than i will come to your shop. But i am also a computer repair guy.
I once had 1 GB IBM laptop HDDs, where I could easily swap the boards without issues. IBM DMCA21080 and DMCA21440 was their model number. I was poor and I trashpicked these drives from laptop repair shops for about a dollar or two.
I had even more luck with recovering data from the exact same drive! I had one with the same motor controller chip burnt to a crisp and I was able to take the exact donor board and hot swap it without even swapping the ROM chip and it worked like a charm! I was in disbelief myself, but it was a 100% successful recovery! I'm fact, I think the drive is ironically still being used to this day, not as a primary or a backup drive, but I believe it's a backup of a backup or something like that, lol!
Personally, I would have refitted the chip by cleaning all the old solder off then using a soldering iron, fixing one pin, then doing the rest of the pins. Especially if you're going to go over it with an iron anyway. Much less chance of heat damaging nearby components.
For the HD dock I have one: tacens -portum duo II- usb3. 1 And I recommend, is old but you can find new. Have 2 docks (only can read from the 1dock) but can clone hard drive alone (no matter the operating system or file system"in some cases you need to initialize the HD only don't need formatting ").only push a button a few seconds and strat cloning from dock1 to dock2 (always check or you erase the hard drive) . Suport HD3, 5/2, 5 and ssd (and iff buy adaptors for any ssd tipe to sata can do the same)
Now that I think of it I can't recall having a WD go bad. Sure I stopped using them after so many years, probably not more than 10, but also have had plenty of Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi, IBM drives die.
@@ravneiv call it lack of luck, but every Seagate I've had, aside for a handful, have failed. I used to build around 30 pcs a year as a side hobby for people at work etc., had so many Seagate failures it just put me off. I know, 'cos I've done it recently, I can still hook up one of these WDs and they just work.
2 tools that really don't cost much that would help out greatly. get a Hakko bottom heater and a Hakko vise (looks like a cylinder). It really makes it much easier to desolder ICs and even BGA.
The reason you should use Linux is, that Windows cannot leave mounted drives alone and will write stuff, where Linux only reads, leading to less risk for additional damage. Not really relevant for this drive, but something to keep in mind.
There is a workaround, that will solve that problem at least in my cases it did: Remove the drive letter from all partitions on the drive. This can be done from windows disk management. If you are doing this sort of stuff on a regular basis, you can also disable windows from automatically assigning drive letters (cmd -> diskpart --> automount disable). In that state, windows will still give you hardware-access to the drive, so you will have sector-level access (for imaging or other recovery software), but windows will not mount the file system, so windows cannot interfere with the recover and the explorer won't freeze on read-errors.
I found the WD Caviar Green to be the worst drives. I've had several fail prematurely and have since avoided buying them. I have been using, Black, Red and Purple and all are still going strong after nearly 10 years of service.
Sometimes could be just dirty/oxydized heads contacts and a scrub make the day. I revived a disk once with just a pencil eraser. The donor one looks quite nasty indeed.
Data recovery is hard. Every timed ive succeeded its been more of a lucky strike than any real skill or ability on my part I fear :( And yes low airflow, high temp is the key to hot air. Only thing I use max airflow for is cooling down the air station Gj
I had some 250GB WD drives in a RAID5 array. After about a year one of the disks failed so I sent it back to WD under warranty. While waiting for the replacement, a second drive in the array failed so of course that was the end of the data :( And the replacements WD sent me were not new but refurbished. I've never touched WD drives since. (I did manage to recover the data using the still good disk, one of the broken disks and a clever bit of software that understood RAID and rebuilt the files sector by sector)
unfortunate, i had a run with seagate 320gb drives dying and havent touched them again either . WD only now and have been lucky.... thats the most important part.. luck
@@OPTIMUS6LTR Isn't it funny. I've had WD failures and have never had a Seagate fail on me. I worked in the corporate environment for a company that used Seagate SCSIs and WD IDEs. It worked for them and they had minimal failures. Go figure.
@@josephking6515 i should clarify currently have 7x16tb HC550s which are actually Hitachi relabeled WD so that could explain it.. but have had luck with Red drives also, Blues never really touched Greens i had ok luck with.
Oh, didn't know about that little ROM chip! Lots of years ago I replaced the whole board of a 320GB drive, and the drive performance absolutely went down, with ridiculously slow read speeds. I was able to recover the data though, so I still think the investment was worth it (the board alone was like 50% the value of a new drive). Now I know why it didn't work like expected. I guess I was lucky it worked at all!
I am all too familiar with the clicking of death on my mechanical hard drives. I still keep a dead one around as a paperweight. The fault in it is not electronic, though.
Yea I like the Pinecil a lot. My only complaint is that the rubber grip feels nice but has actually been slipping as of late, I need to put a little bit of double-sided tape under it. I've also been hearing a lot of good things about the Miniware TS101, but no idea what the cost/availability of it is like.
I have a problematic 8 tb drive that used to shut down randomly (until I used a right-angle data cable that doesn't press against the side panel). I noticed it has a slight crack in the material of the connector (close to where the pins are). Assuming that's the cause, hypothetically speaking would you be able to fix that?
will this still work if the donor board has different chips? same pcb, same board number, the chips do the same things but are of different manufacturers, any issues with still doing the eeprom swap for such a case? the drive in question is an old ide drive that i am unable to determine which component is responsible for it being unresponsive, no obvious burn marks
I have one for M.2 drives, but for HDDs this little stardock has never let me down. USB bridges are not advised for data recovery, but I lucked out on mine, it seems to work very well.
@@Adamant_IT Ahh the Inateck one I have is very good. Never had issue. Even great for cloning over Xbox drives. I did my original 500GB to an SSD a while ago.. Dunno about PS drives though
That's exactly what I was thinking. Once the data was secure, resolder the 'new' chip back onto the 'new' board and put it back on the 'new' drive and the copy data across. It would seem a waste to have chucked that brand new donor drive in the bin.
I have a hard drive here which i am sure is the same.I brought a donor board to get the chip replaced but about 20 telephone calls to repair shops here in new zealand none can replace the chip so i never progressed further.
Yes, because the ROM chip data relates to the disk geometry as well. A loose analogy would be; Imagine you have a wall of filing cabinets labelled as columns and rows. Some of the draws are jammed and don't open, so you have a Custom label on them saying 'don't use this one'. Some of the draw labels are swapped around to put a specific label in an easier to reach location. Now imagine all the Custom labels are removed. The contents of the cabinets is all still there, but all that extra information about where some stuff is, what drawers are jammed, etc, is now lost, so the drive needs to build up all this info again - and some of it may be lost forever, which could result in permanently degraded performance.
Can you make a video on how you made and run your repair shop? It seems really difficult for me yo imagine how id be able to run a profitable business lol
Brother how much do you charge for this? I have recently done a recovery by the same methods and charged £170 for labour. I recovered 350gb of family photos, Is that fair in the current market?
It seems to vary by country a lot. Data recovery in the UK is very expensive. If you send the drive to a lab and they need to rebuild it (take apart the mechanics, etc) I would expect a bill of £700-£1400. I don't charge anywhere near this amount, because my data recovery methods are for easier jobs like this - I don't have the skill or equipment to rebuild a HDD.
Why not first: try swapping in ONLY the donor circuit board? Then if the drive can't be read, go on to swapping the soldered chips. Thus potentially saving some time, if a circuit board swap alone would suffice.
@@cjmillsnun All I'm saying is: first see if it works, without the extra effort of de-soldering/soldering. Maybe the rom is capable of re-learning when applied to the new spinning drive. There should be very little chance of doing any kind of data damage while in read-only mode, and could have saved some repair effort.
I have similarly swapped hdd boards without messing with the eeprom just fine and that's the safest way. But if you must, first get a $10 eeprom reader and back up both. Also, if you learn how to interpret wd model numbers you can match more compatible donor boards.
