I bought myself a heatgun and replacement PCB for a fried HDD. I swapped the BIOS chip over by following your video and to my utter suprise the drive span up and I got a 6TB drive back from the dead. I've renamed the drive Phoenix. Thanks :-D
@@jdigi78 what does it mean when you change the bios chip but it still doesn’t recognizes the HDD. The drive use to work but had a burnt mark on the pcb. So I now swapped the bios. Still nothing. It spins and acts like it try’s to load.
Liked and subbed. Thank you for the tutorial. Ive done several of these with success. A few minor notes, if you will allow. Zoom in...way in. The distance leaves some to wonder. The flux is really important when removing any component. You didnt mention it in the first chip removal, but did in the second. More flux at 5:09. You showed having to move the chip, flux will help the chip magnetize to the contacts. :) Very nice work though. Screw that sucker back on and hope for the best...or at least good. Thanks for posting.
Thank you for this! Question... I received a replacement logic board from China for a WD HDD but, on swap out before replacing BIOS chip, the drive motor would not spin up. Because there is a slight bit of damage to the board I am wondering of there are larger problems with the board or if this behaviour is to be expected prior to BIOS replacement? Or is the motor chip probably bad?
great video, I wanted to know if I could still use the new pcb if I got rid of the old one that had the original bios. So far with the new PCB the drive spins but doesn't show on the OS. Thanks!
i have bought a replacement pcb and moved the bios chip from the old one to the new one, but it shows an i/o error. do you think i need to move other chips? any suggestions?
This board like seagate st2000dm001. I need this. My external hdd is not working: not seen on pc, hdd turning low volume read/write head sound. sometimes happen sounds like scratch.. I think problem on board. What you think?
Another question: I bought this hard drive as an external usb storage device. It has failed. I took the hard drive out of the enclosure and put a Donor Board PCB on the hard drive without swapping out the PCB Firmware Rom Chip. I did this in order to see just how bad the damage was on the drive before sending it off to a “professional recovery service”. It appears to be in great shape and spins up nicely however, windows see’s the hard drive but cannot access the data. My main question is can I swap out the PCB Firmware Rom Chip from the original PCB Board with a rework station myself or do I need professionals do it(because I connected the drive without the correct Firmware Rom Chip; First)? Does advance programming or something else need to be done besides replacing the Firmware Rom Chip. Please advise and explain why/why not. I read on another repair website that Seagate drives have to have a professional swap out the Firmware Rom Chip if you connected the drive to the Donor Board without swapping the Firmware Rom Chip first. Does something special have to be done or am I reading this wrong? The website does say that you can do it yourself at your own risk if you feel comfortable.
Other than number on PCB, must have to match the capacity as well? Like transferring BIOS chip from 10TB PCB to 4TB PCB, but both have same brand, numbers and type.
Ahh yes the bios chip, that makes sense. I bought a replacement board years ago and never took it further than that, kept the drive with the hopes of recovering it. There is hope!
It's a good job. Thank you for this video helped me to enhance my skill in Electronic mostly about soldering an ic part. Thank alot for share this video. [Greeting for Indonesia] ^_^
Well, looks like this is where my journey ends. For everyone that has been thoughtful and kind. Thank you. Looks like with the unexpected crash of this hard drive and the mistakes that I have made, I will not be able to retrieve this data. I will hold onto this drive-in case technology changes in the future or if I become independently wealthy and can afford a “professional recovery service”. To all the negative people out there. Humans are human. We make mistakes even when we know better. My father has been in computers for over 50+ years in the military. I know a lot about computers and backups. Life got in the way. I have a lot going on right now and the last thing I need is smart aleck comments about backing up data. Anyhow, I hope everyone has a wonderful day and wish all of you the best of success in life.
If I have a Seagate drive with the click of death, do you know if it is possible the PCB is to blame? It spins up, clicks multiple times, then stops, and spins down. I'm trying to determine if I may be able to fix it myself or have to send the drive for recovery.
hey man, i have an identical hard drive but one is broken, the sata port is broken, so can i just replace the board from the identical hard drive without any special tools in order to recover data?
I have an old MAXTOR 20.4 hd, but I can't seem to locate the bios chip. I am wondering if I can just swap out the pcb with a donor one to get it to work?
@@jdigi78 Cheers, gotta try my options. I've sent one of the backups to a recovery company, and one is for myself to see what i can do. Basically lost 10 years worth of work after a pc case short.
Hi, thank you for this video. Is it possible to avoid the swap of the bios chip by using a tool like ch341? The idea is to read bios data from the old bios chip and write to the new one.
Yes, however, it depends upon whether the flash ROM (BIOS) is correctly recognized / selected within the flash programmer SW. I was able to do this on an older circa 2012 HDD, however, using two different flash programmer SW (on CH341a) I could not correctly identify the 25FU406C flash ROM on an HGST (Hitachi now WD) 1TB 2.4" as it appears WD has modified the flash ROM offset so when I attempted to use other common (LE25FU406BMA and W25P40) IC selections it only corrupted the test flash ROM so I will now have to attempt solder process. *** Warning ***I Strongly suggest you perform a backup of the donor HDD flash ROM (BIOS) first and re-flash back to the same donor BIOS and boot/access test (before) attempting to backup and flash the original BIOS to the donor BIOS else you could corrupt your original BIOS and it will become unusable (even with soldering process).
I will be geting my rework station tomorrow. May I ask what heat setting is best for removing this PCB Board Firmware Rom Chip? It has a digital setting with three numbers on it so I would assume I could set it to the exact setting. I need both settings one for the soldering device and one for the heat gun part. It has two settings.
Dude you are amazing man, hope you are successful and doing well. Another question. You can't use a firmware or bios or whatever transfer program like ch341 to simply transfer this critical information or program it into the donor board without doing the rework station swap is there? No worries if not, I already ordered everything I need from your video.
When i looked for pcbs to replace my hard drive pcb because i have broken sata pins which are lost. i saw the whole thing about replacing the bios too with soldering and whatever, i immediately quit. Then i watched your video and now im ordering the pcb. PS: the pcb has to be the same model number as your damaged hard drive pcb model number!
I used a cheap generic hot air/soldering iron combo for this video. Any hot air solder rework station will work, remember to remove the part from the new board first as practice since you won't need that chip after the swap
I tested on a old HDD PCB and had good success with 310 C (hard drive worked). I just used flux and the same solder. I'm interested, too, what temperature you recommend. I heard too low is worse.
Hi Joseph - thank you for the very clear video. I have a Seagate hard drive which I can "feel" spins up but the computer BIOS refuses to recognise the drive. The BIOS takes ages to load - a couple of minutes. I *think* the motor seems ok as the drive spins up. Do you feel that swapping the board (and the BIOS chip) would work? Or am I barking up the wrong tree? Many thanks, Alex.
Hi I need to do this myself so I bought a soldering kit. I do not have the heat blower but the hot-tip pen from the kit. I only get one shot on this so I do not want to do any damage. My questions are: - Can I use the hot-tip pen instead of the blower you are using. - Will the heat damage the chip in anyway - if I melt the soldering and it spreads and make the pins of the chip touch each other, will that cause a problem. You seem to do it very casually. - What is the cleaning liquid you used and why? - Can you advice me on how to do this with a hot-tip pen instead? Many thanks
helo Sir, My hdd is spinning normally, but the device cannot be read by the bios, is there any possibility that the hdd can be repaired by replacing pcb and swapping bios ?
Joseph, could you please write a few words about your equipment. What kind of tool (hot air rework station) did you use in the video? And what was the temperature? How large should be the air volume? i'm asking this because some hot air guns have air volume regulator. And i don't know what would could be the safe operational mode. Thanks for the video.
I used a generic 852D+ rework station, I don't remember the settings I used but I imagine it was around 380-400c. You should practice on spare parts to just get a feel for the proper airflow and temperature yourself.
@@jdigi78 Thanks for the answer. I'm gonna try it on dead Seagate pcb. But it is kinda scary. i'm concerned that the same temperature would kill the good one / the new one pcb. But anyway thanks. Quick chip is very costly alloy...
I have one HD and i can not start hd because of problem with pcb Can i take bios from broken pcb and put on new (same HD ) pcb . And thet new pcb with replaced ( old ) bios instal in my HD
I don't remember, sorry. Look up a hot air reflow tutorial for more information. It's best to just practice on some junk electronics with similar sized chips and find what works best for your gear.
I don't have any equipment. Ordered the cheapest soldering iron on amazon for 7 bucks. Can this be done with just that? I practiced on the old motherboard and nothing seems to melt. I got the tiniest tip on the iron and put it to 450 but nothing would melt. Got the biggest flat tip and tried to heat up the entire component and nothing. I'm hoping the chip is easier than the one I practiced on.
You should watch a soldering tutorial, you need to apply fresh solder to the tip to wet it so it makes good contact. Also to do this with an iron and not a hot air rework station you need something like chipquik, it stays molten longer so you can heat all the legs at once
my 250 gb seagate hdd is detected in bios, but the same is not shown in windows ... i tried to re-solder the contact parts on pcb .. but not succeeded .... help & guide in this regard ... another question ... if i got another identical hdd pcb (with identical rev. no., firmware version, etc.), can i just swap the pcd and will it work or i also need to swap hdd bios/ram to target pcb ??
Well im in the same boat now with a WD 5tb external hard drive Have all the items and need the bios swap, well see if i can find someone locally to do the swap and a good price. If not ill take my chances and do it myself 😂 doesnt seem that difficult at the end of the day with the right tools. Tried swapping it alone (knew it wouldnt work but doesnr hurt to try)but wont read anything
can you just get another board from the same drive and just use that ? I have an old hard drive that doesn't spin. One day it just popped and never turned on again. I'm trying to see if I can get the same board and try to replace it. It's this model: wd4000aaks 00tma0
Hi there, great video mate. This helped my uncle who's a dairy farmer. His HDD failed and we tried this after a few other things. I have another question though. I've a galaxy s6 that I currently can't access the storage on as the screen is not displaying and it's locked. When I plug it in it needs to be in debug mode to access storage but I can't because screen is blank and it wasn't set up before hand. I've got different software but Samsung's are encrypted so even though it's detected by windows I still can't get anything off it. I've tried to use a mouse but nothings working. It's basically like a usb I can't access. I think I might need to remove the flash or transplant into another s6. Any ideas? Thank you
happy to help! I'd just replace the phone screen before anything else, if it really is just the screen broken. Swapping chips in a phone is very different because it's likely encrypted and may use other parts of the phone for that encryption.
I have an segate expansion external hard drive 3,5 ; 2TB and when I plug the usb cable the sound of new drive plays and then nothing in my computer but in disk management it will show or in bios or in device manager ! my question is,if i will buy new pcb boart find after the qr code from the hard disk,it will work? thank you !
does the drive vibrate or anything? if not the board replacement might work. Sometimes the drive will still attempt to show up in device manager etc because the usb controller in the external hard drive is still working fine
@@BV18BLD if it makes any noise at all it's likely powering up and the board is not likely the issue. Things to look for now would be "RAW" format in disk manager which means it is reading data but is corrupted. I'd consult a local repair shop before seeking any mail-in drive recovery options
I had a external WD 3TB hard drive i got two months ago and it was having some connecting issues and then it stopped connecting completely like when i plug it in it doesn't act like it's plugged in. It does not spin at all and the light does not blink unless i bend the hdd usb port at certain point but even when the light blinks the hdd does not spin and acts dead. Please help me out here.
Hi I have a hard drive it spins and works for just a few seconds, then stops sending data/info to my computer but it continues to spin, do you think this would solve my problem?
@@jdigi78 Thanks for getting back to me, seeing the disk is still spinning and there are no sounds (clicking) coming from inside of the drive I think I will give this a try.
I need to do this. Mine is a WD 1 TB REV A 2060-771289-005. WHat other numbers need to match? Or is a PCB with this revision number bgood enough? Thanks
@@jdigi78 Thanks for replying. What about the DCM (drive configuration matrix), LBA (logical block addressing) numbers etc. I'm able to fairly easily find matching revision numbers. One last question. Have you used the technique in the video more than once? In the video which numbers of yours matched?
@@jdigi78 I tried to change once only whole board but pc did not see HDD... If i can find same revision i will try than, the data in it most important thing to me.
I got my cord stuck on a chair and ripped the usb-c plug off my Western Digital ssd. It has the WD password protection. If I order the exact same board and swap the bios chip, do you think there would be any problems with passwords? It is set up to automatically recognize my computer when plugged in.
So I got an identical board and swapped the chip. It didn't seem too difficult, and everything looks to be good. When I plug it in, it sounds to be spinning up normally. The computer recognizes it, but nothing shows in file explorer. No E drive. I can see it in disk management and says the drive is working normally, but I can't access anything. Any thoughts?
After about 20-30 seconds I can hear the drive make a different sound and it turns off or shuts down. I can still see it on the computer though... strange
No. It just shows up by name under removable devices. I don't have it in front of me right now, but when I right click to view properties, under disk space it says "unknown". or "undefined".
HD-Front ufile.io/lk1a7uhh HD-Back ufile.io/c3svwk11 Repair - Front ufile.io/ez3jou40 Repair - Back ufile.io/h77bd47a Granted please note they said that the original rom was too damaged to transfer. They did this as a courtesy. I have another pcb donor board that has supposedly a new rom with my original bios information transferred over to it. However, you can see here the "condition” of the original rom. I am hoping all the information can still be transferred from this rom. Its not beat up too bad right? Both pcb donor boards; the one with the original rom and the new transferred over with the information rom do not power up the drive at all. Zero, zilch, nada. I can post photos of the new rom and new board if needed as well however, it looks good I believe. If the information was transferred over properly.
They might have been referring to a heat gun which isn't temperature controlled or focused. A hot air rework station is exactly what you need for smd components.
@@jdigi78 Thanks for the quick reply, as for as a understnad heat gun and hot air gun are the same thing. So I shouldn't be using either one, correct? I have a hot air gun for 30 dollars, made in china, 2 modes - 300 c and 500 celsius. What temperature should the solder station be put at?
@@crazystuff9726 the key word here would be rework station, if your hot air gun has some nozzle to focus the heat like mine it may work okay. Get some old junk with smd components on it and give it a try
After a week of madness of acquiring/researching all the needed tools and PCB replacement, with faith but little hope I could make it work and recover my data, I'm hyped to share that it worked for me and its such a relieve to accomplish for somebody that has no experience with soldering, take your time doing it and I will definitely recommend to get one of the Chip Quick removal kits that includes the flux and alloy, it helps a lot to work neatly around the bios chip! Thanks to Joseph DiGiovanni for the guided video
i also meant to say, find a few old ded hard drive pcbs and practice on them. Youll be surprised at how simple it gets, but get a hot air gun, with tips, 35 bucks, anywhere. It makes all the difference. :)
@@jdigi78 man i fucked my donor pcb chip I put flux hot air on it had tweezers and the chip broke off it smh and resadue on pcb..glad it was not my my pcb that had data fon 50 bucks down the drain omfg im so mad you make ot look easy the bios chip would not budge at all on my end and it broke.
@@kevinthorn9672 try putting fresh solder on the pins before using the hot air. Use a higher temp. You shouldn't need to pull the chip off with force, the solder should melt and it'll fall right off
Do you still respond on here I need help to please, one of my hard drives gets powers it's pretty obvious because when I've got it plugged in it gets warm, but the platters aren't spinning and there's no vibration... DO i need to replace the whole PCB ALONG with a BIOS or just the PCB as a whole. Western Digital NAS 6TB 2014, Please help thanks!
if it gets warm it could be a short on the pcb. I would swap the board, you will most likely need to swap the bios chip as well. if you're not comfortable with doing it ask a local computer shop if they can do it. Avoid chains like geeksquad though
@@jdigi78 SO if my hard-drive is getting power, does that mean I still have a 90% Chance by replacing the pcb/bios chip, that my hard drive will work?? Even if the platters aren't spinning I was switching harddrive bays earlier on, my harddrive was working 100% fine never dropped or anything, i think it maybe fried circuit.. so i highly doubt it's the spinners Do you think with this being said that it could be the spoinners, i hope it's not!
@@jdigi78 That doesn't answer, to much and give me hope.. Would you say the platters are fucked or stuck, what's the chances in that? because that's something 100% I dont want to really deal with if they are
I'm not confident it's the pcb but if you know what you're doing there is a low risk of damaging anything doing a pcb swap so you may want to try that first to rule it out. I'm not familiar with head swapping or any other form of HD repair sorry
I have swapped the board and move the old bios chip to new one, it read on diskmanager but asked me to initialize and when i did it give error There's no rough noise or click on the drive Any solution?
What was the original issue? Was the drive not spinning? Initializing the drive was probably not a good idea as it wipes the partition table. But the fact that it suggested you do that indicates a bad partition table was the issue to begin with
@@jdigi78 my assumption was from the board due to it's very quiet (no spinning sound at the beginning), when i swap the board it spins and detected by computer but required initialization that won't work... So curious if you ever find similar case and that you might have any kind of solution? Thanks!
I just did this exact process but sadly my HDD is still not detected by my PC. I can hear my hard drive spinning but that's just about it. Can you please advise? Thanks so much!
@@jdigi78 No it's not showing up in disk management. I'm pretty sure I did everything including swapping the BIOS chip. Any chance I can fix my drive some other way?
Recap: 1-Looks like my original bios was erased. 2-Looks like my original bios was only partially copied over to the new rom.: 512K worth. 3-I have one PCB Donor Board that boots up the hard drive and keeps it running but o/s can't read the data. 4. Data Recovery Place that transferred my bios to another PCB Donor Board, said they don't back up roms and they don't have my rom to email me. What are my options?
Outside of contacting a big name recovery company, none. The rom contains important calibration data and it would take some serious equipment, software, and knowledge to be able to get the data with just the platters
Don't know what I'm doing wrong. When it comes to removing the chips I can't get them to budge. I've got a soldering iron heated to a good temperature but when I use it with the tweezers I can't get the chips to budge, at all. You made it look so easy! Any ideas anybody? I'm just about at the giving up stage with this HDD.
if you're using a standard soldering iron try a product like chip quik. it's solder that stays molten longer. Otherwise try applying fresh leaded solder to the pins before trying to remove, lead free solder found in consumer devices can be harder to work with
I fried my 2tb Seagate barracuda from using wrong psu cables. I swapped boards with another drive I had and I felt the disk spin up so I bought a replacement board. Swapped over bios chip and it doesn't spin. Like what are the odds I got a bad replacement? Sucks man, I feel defeated.
It's pretty likely actually. The boards are from junk drives so they are likely all untested. I'd say they're pretty likely to give a refund or just send you another if you tell them it doesn't work. Leave out the fact that you swapped the bios chip though. Probably a good idea to do the same spin test with the new board you purchased before swapping the chip
@@jdigi78 Yeah I definitely should've tried to power it up beforehand, kicking myself for that lol. I ordered through AliExpress so I'm not gonna hold my breathe they'd send a replacement, but it was cheap enough that I might just buy 2-3 this time. One has gotta work right 😅 Forgot to mention the first time but thanks a lot for the video it was my first time doing something like this and it was very easy to follow a long with you 👍
I suppose it would continue to work but I personally wouldn't trust it because I've seen some of the replacement boards come in pretty bad shape. If you're going to do that at least invest in a good backup solution
what exactly need to match on the new hd to pull this off? cant find any reliable info with google. Model sure. Firmware also. "date code"? Need to know before i go buy some shit of ebay for $$$
Highly unlikely. The data is on the platter disks internally, not stored on a circuit or chip like solid state drives. The circuit pcb is for making it function.
I have a Seagate Archive HDD (Seagate (STEB8000100) Expansion Desktop 8TB External Hard Drive HDD - USB 3.0 for PC Laptop). It was in an external enclosure. I have several external hard drives including a WD. I may have accidently used my WD power adapter for my Seagate Archive HDD. Nevertheless, my Seagate Archive HDD is no longer working. I bought several of these Expansion Drives. I opened another one and it is a Seagate Barracuda instead of a Seagate Archive HDD. I was just hoping to have a Donor for parts but no luck there. I went ahead and ordered from an online website the exact match PCB boards to see if I can get this hard drive working by myself. I am not looking forward to sending this off to a Data Recovery Service, but I am thinking about it. If someone could help me troubleshoot this a little beforehand to see if I can get this working without having to send it off that would be greatly appreciated. Here are my thoughts. The drive is completely silent, there was never a horrific ending to the drive. Like it is spinning up and crashing, knocking, beeping, whatever. Just one day I plugged it in and nothing. Now here is the odd part. It seems like something is barely connecting because in keeps connecting and discounting in windows. You hear the Windows Notification that it connects and then disconnects. Sometimes it stays connected and you can see in “Computer Management” under “Disk Management” the drive. It is like it is barely connected on a sub low level. What will happen is that in “Disk Management” a window will pop up and say you must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it. MBR vs GPT. Of course, after doing this, I get the error “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error”. Disk 2, red down arrow, Unknown, Not Initialized Most of the time the partition data or the available space does not show up in disk management, but rarely it does show up, i.e., size of partition and available space to create a disk partition. However, even when that shows up it still gives me the error “The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error”. My thoughts are that the drive is fully functional, but I may have blown a diode or something. The hard drive was sitting in an enclosure and had an extra PCB Board that was a bridge between the power supply and the hard drive. This other PCB board on the external enclosure is working perfectly. I popped out another Hard Drive from another enclosure used it on the bridge and everything works perfectly. So, I am not sure how the Seagate Archive HDD failed even when the External PCB power supply which held it did not. This is what leads me to be that somehow the PCB Board is no longer working on the Seagate Archive HDD and this may be a simple solution. I ordered a new PCB Donor Board and was hoping all I must do is transfer the “Bios” and install the new Donor Board and everything works. My question is troubleshooting. Before messing around with my vital “Bios” chip. Can I just swap out my Donor Board to just see if power is restored and the drive spins up? I know I will not be able to access the Data however, I would be able to confirm that my other original PCB board is the main culprit. Then proceed to swapping the “Bios” chip on the Donor Board. Will swapping the PCB board without swapping the “Bios” chip cause any “Data” loss or damage the Seagate Archive HDD? Troubleshooting Steps -1 Order Donor PCB Board -2 Swap Original Board with Donor Board without Swapping Bios Chip -3 See if Seagate Archive HDD powers on whatsoever, spins, etc. -4 If powers on and spins up, swap out Bios Chip -5 If Bios Chip is swapped and drive is still not responsive begin consultation with “Data Recovery Service”. Another question is do I simply just send this off to a “Data Recovery Service” I would hate to swap out my Bios chip and make it more difficult for them to recover. However, if it is a simple PCB Board Swap and Bios Swap, I would prefer to do it myself. Please feel free to give me any other pointers. I am just trying to perform some basic troubleshooting tactics before sending this drive off for an expensive recovery. I just have a feeling that this might be as simple as a PCB Board/Bios swap because the drive was never dropped, and in perfect condition. It is not that old either. Thanks!
There shouldn't be any data loss caused by swapping the PCB without the bios chips, if this is an external drive you can replace the USB3 to SATA PCB without needing to swap any chips. If that doesn't fix it though you may need to swap the PCB on the actual drive itself and its respective bios chip
@@jdigi78 wow, thanks so much for replying. Yes, I have three of these drives. I took apart two of them. I interchanged the USB3 to SATA PCB boards on the non working drive with no luck. The good hard drive works on both USB3 to SATA PCB boards but the non working hard drive does not. Therefore, I am thinking it is the PCB Board that is at fault. What are the odds that this is a PCB Board is the main issue and this can be resolved easily? I have a couple PCB boards on the way to play around with. I will practice first on a couple of dead drives (soldering, etc.) that I do not care about. However, I do want to be very careful. I will swap without bios chip first and then try with bios chip after practicing. I have read in extreme lucky cases you can just swap out the PCB board and it works. I doubt I will be that lucky.
@@angelthman1659 Macs can be picky about mounting failing or corrupt drives. I'd recommend mounting it in linux as read only or if it has windows on it use a windows machine. Linux would be ideal though
I have the EXACT same situation. I don't even need to recover the data (Time Machine saved me), but I'd like to be able to use the 750GB as either a 2nd external backup or, preferably, an internal 2nd hd, with partitions.@@angelthman1659 Thanks for your question!
Okay, I finally connected the bad drive directly to my motherboard to see if I could see it in my BIOS. Nothing. Can't see a thing. I connected one of the good drives and I could see it perfectly in my BIOS including the size of the partition. So how I can see this bad drive in Windows under Disk Management connected via a usb controller but I can't see it in my BIOS. When it is connected in Windows I can't do anything with it because it wont initialize, but something is connected. Oh wait a minute, I think windows is seeing the USB Controller and the USB Controller is telling windows something is here, however, when windows goes to access the drive through the controller there is no response. Honestly, what I am thinking is that this bad drive is getting zero power. I mean when I hooked up the good drive it immediately powered up and you could hear everything working, spinning, etc. When I hook up the bad drive, absolutely nothing happens, as if the drive never turned on. I think all the confusion is the USB Controller that was enclosed in the External Case is what is causing all of these confusion problems. If I connect the bad drive to the motherboard directly, zero, zilch, nothing. I don't feel anything, no spin, no clunking, not even it attempting to turn on. What does this mean? Possible bad PCB Board? Or the Drive more than like Seized? I would think that if the drive seized you would hear it power up some and try to do this and that. I am more incline to think the PCB is dead and nothing power/information/commands are even getting to the hard drive. What do you think?
Another Update: Okay I got my ROM back. Well, I got my ROM back that is a New ROM. They said that my original ROM was too damaged, but they were successful at transferring the ROM information from my Original ROM to this NEW ROM. They checked twice that it was transferred over successful. Well of course it did not work. The drive is seen in windows but barely. It is doing the same thing before like the original problem. Completely and 100% silent. (I think all windows recognizes is the bridge that it is connected to). This is the weirdest part. I ordered some more PCB Donor Boards and if I put any of those on this hard drive the drive comes to life. It boots up twice or tries to read the drive twice and gives up. What dose all this mean? Did some how the original ROM get corrupted and is permanently damaged? Long Shot They suggest the file system could be corrupted and that this is almost 100% fixable. Connect PC Max 3000 and either get lucky and extract the data by bypassing the software lock because the drive is in defensive mode or rip the data off raw but will take a while (same as bypassing the locked codes). Recap: 1-Original PCB Board with Original BIOS in perfect shape (something happened): -Drive would not boot up, completely silent, not moving or humming at all. OFF. 2-New PCB Donor Board with random bios that is already on the board (Testing): -Drive boots up and tries to read but gives up and fails. 3-New PCB Donor Board with Original BIOS (I installed it myself, botched it up) -Drive would not boot up, completely silent, not moving or humming at all. OFF. 4-New PCB Donor Board with New Rom (Installed by professional, bios information transferred over) -Drive would not boot up, completely silent, not moving or humming at all. OFF. … What does all this mean? Something is corrupted with the original bios? How does the drive power up and try to read with a random donor board with whatever BIOS that came with it; but when it is connected with the original bios its dead as a door nail? I will be getting back my original pcb board and original bios/rom. I’m sure the ROM is in ruff shape but the information has been transferred over to a new ROM. So that is good at least. What are my options at this point? Is my data lost forever?
@@ChineseSe7en there are other things that could be the problem, but if the drive doesn't spin or you don't hear the head attempting to read the data it is likely the board. You can't just swap the boards without the bios chip. You may be able to take the PCBs to a computer shop and ask them to do this specific task, they may do it
