Earlier today while booting my media box I realized one of my WD5000AAKS drives in my RAID0 array (out of two) was not being powered on. As in, no noise, no power, cold to the touch. My guess is: there is somesort of electrical failure rather than mechanical, quite probably PCB related. I haven't removed the PCB yet to examine the IC's underneath however I will soon. Before I started I just wanted some advice from more experienced folks. (While I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron, I have never tinkered with anything hard drive related.)

Both drives are identical models, and the PCB's themselves look nearly identical (99% easily). Here are the drive model #'s and PCB markings:

Drive 1: (failed one)
PCB label:
2061 - 701477 - 800 AC
XC 4D05 0D46 A 0005420 7425

Drive model and details:
Model: WD5000AAKS - 75TMA0
Date: May 1st 2007
DCM: HHRCHV2CHB


Drive 2: (working one)
PCB label:
2061 - 701477 - 900 AD10
XC 4V16 7NPK J 0007110 9117

Drive model and details:
Model: WD5000AAKS - 00C8A0
Date: September 28th 2008
DCM: DBRNNT2MHB

My questions:

1. What are my chances that the PCB will be compatible? After some research right here on these forums somebody mentioned that only the middle six digit string in on the PCB label (in my case 701477) should match. They do match on both of the PCB's. Is this enough?

2. What are the chances of the working PCB getting damaged or becoming faulty in the swap? Somebody mentioned that PCB's can get "locked".

3. How would I go about backing up the array/mirrored contents of the other healthy drive before removing the PCB (just in case I end up with two failed drives)? I ask because I can only get one drive working at the time (only one healthy PCB to go around).

Any other tips, advice, or information will be welcomed.

Note: While I do have a partial backup for this array, that backup is several months old. I have previously contacted a "Data Recovery Specialist" in my area (Chicago, Illinois) and was given a quote/estimate of $1500 to $4300 for the data recovery process. So, I figured I could save myself the price of a used car and give it a shot myself being that I'm semi competent when it comes to electronics and handling a multimeter/soldering iron.

Also, on at least one occasion the failed drive did power on, but refused to do so on further attempts. There were no clicking noises or any strange noises at all. Also, for what it is worth, I did regularly check my SMART attributes and they were always fine. (Which means nothing, but points to a power surge/PCB failure)

If you do some searching on pcb failure you will find plenty of information to help you. I would check the fuses first and if your lucky you may be able to repair at home. If its not the fuses then your out of luck and will need the assistance of a professional. A pcb can not be exchanged as simple as the urban legend suggests due microcodes unique to each drive.

Personally I would not try and use your second RAID array drive as a donor for parts. The reasoning for that should be obvious.

First step carefully and esd safely remove your pcb. If you take a nice close high resolution picture of both sides and post it people maybe be able to give you better advice.

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Zero Alpha > https://zeroalpha.com.au

The PCB is totally compatible. The unique drive info stored on each will be different, obviously. Without the necessary tools your only hope of DIY success is getting the (maybe) bad PCB working again. However at this point you don't even know that that is what the problem is.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

If you are planning just to change PCB with another one it will not work (chances that you would kill good PCB are low but if preamp is fried it could happen)
To make PCB compatible you can try to swap biggest square chips (MCUs)
But I really doubt it can be done with only sodering iron but if you double price of used car you could get handy soldering station for BGA re-work
Good luck

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

You need pro. help and it might not be expensive at this point.

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www.datarecoveryne.com

I appreciate all the responses and information. I will have to put off the PCB removal until tomorrow since I could not locate my precision torx screwdriver set I got stashed somewhere.

Zero Alpha, you said something about fuses. I found some info right here on these forums and some user called "cheadledatarecovery", a data recovery specialist apparently, said and I quote: "Western Digital drives do not have fuse/diode protection (unlike Seagate & Samsung)". Is this correct?

harddrivespecialistm, I have contacted another data recovery specialist in the meantime. The first place I contacted were Chicago Data Recovery Corp @ http://www.chicagodatarecoverycorp.com ...Their estimate was $1500-$4300 with free evaluation. However, they aren't even located in Chicago where I live. That was pretty dishonest of them to being with. The rep on the phone kept contradicting himself: he kept saying that RAID0 recoveries are easy but very costly because they are difficult. (?!) I felt the entire time like I was talking to a sleazy car mechanic.

After posting here I looked for another data recovery specialist that was actually in my city. I googled and found Promise Chicago Data Recovery Services who also do free evaluations, however the rep on the phone told me that the repair would cost $2000-$2500 at a absolute minimum because it was a disk that belonged to a RAID array. He didn't explain it and I didn't ask why.

At this point I might actually visit the Promise Chicago Data Recovery Services just to get the free evaluation. Although I doubt they will actually tell me what is wrong unless I look like I'm about to shell out $2500 or more. (like any car mechanic)

Again, if it is just the fuses, it would be great. As for moving the MCU, I do have some ancient hobbyist experience with MCU programming (Zilog MCU's were my passion once upon a time) but I doubt anything I have stashed in my closet is compatible or sufficient for whatever proprietary stuff is on that WD PCB.

Those prices are pretty steep, even for commercial data recovery.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Hi Shaman,

Can you take a good picture of the pcb and post it for me please?

Also I think this thread is similar to yours: wd5000aaks-00tma0-firmware-2061-701477-900-04p-t9998.html

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Zero Alpha > https://zeroalpha.com.au

There is an undisputed truth : when adaptive data is in the MCU (the big Marvell chip), assuming you get a compatible PCB, you have to remove the BGA chip, reball it, remove the donor BGA and resolder it.
Only the tools to do this will exceed the double the cost for a professional data recovery (I mean professional tools to play it safe).
Truth is hard to face sometimes.

I finally found my torx kit and got the PCB off. Nothing of obvious interest as far as I can see. Nothing is burnt or out of place. I went over it with a magnifying glass. It does not mean there is nothing wrong several layers down into the PCB or that the IC's themselves are not scrambled but on the surface everything looks ok. As far as my own experiences go, in case of catastrophic failures like this coming from power spikes, there is usually lot of visual clues, like burnt parts.

(Just last year I had a DVD-RW drive go dead on me. There was a loud crack and burning smell. After opening the casing I found some random IC that was 80% burnt with surrounding area burnt as well.)

Photo: (photo is pretty lousy, but I can try and get a better shot with my other camera if you can't distinguish the features easily.)



Time to break out the multimeter?

Quick update: I think I found something out of place. I just took another look with my magnifying glass: those circled areas are burnt alright. (photo below)

So what would you do?

Sometimes the black foam between the drive chassis and the PCB gets hot and sticks to the components and looks burned but isn't necessarily. Just sayin.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Just to cut a long story short : I know that hurts, but some things are beyond end user repair. If the data is really important, pack the drive and get professional advice...before it's too late.

What about this: what if I had a backup/cloned image of the drive that failed (not the whole array, just the failed disk). Could I restore that image on another 500GB drive (another new WD5000AAKS even) and then pair it up with the working disk and re-initialize my RAID-0 array? Is there something on the low-level that would impair this? I'm not sure how RAID-0 works, especially with soft-RAID like intel ICH10R. I know that data is split evenly on two disks. Would ICH10R chipset refuse to work with the clone, even if it's the same drive model? (I assume that ICH10R holds all the relevant RAID info in the BIOS ROM, since my motherboard has no separte RAID ROM onboard) I mean, would just booting/initializing the cloned-drive AND working drive corrupt data, much less work?

Also, could I just use some application like RAID Reconstructor from Runtime.org and use images from both disks to reconstruct the data?

Like I mentioned in my previous post, I can probably get my hands on the image of the failed drive. I've been looking for ICH10R whitepapers. Nothing so far. Intel has released only few bits here and there, but from my random Googling it seems there are some indications for such scenarios being tried. I just need to figure out if the onboard RAID will give me issues due to the fact that one of the drives is not the original one. (As long as the data is identical it should work, right? Unless RAID wrote something to each drive's firmware or something weird and unusual like that?)

In the end I think that tool from Runtime.org (RAID Reconstructor) could help out with raw images of both drives. Get a big 2TB drive, move both 500GB images there and let that tool work it out.

Anyone have any experience with such scenarios?

If you had a raw image of both drives, getting your data would be a piece of cake for someone who knows how to do it.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

Yeah, that would be one thing to try. I was just wondering if it was easier and safe to just clone the image to another similar (or same model) drive and just plug it in. I don't know how RAID would respond. Was hoping somebody here knew more.

Probably just depends on how smart your RAID controller is.

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

The dumber the better, eh? This might be one of the few benefits of cheap non-hardware based RAID setups. I hope.