Hi there,
I have a slight/major problem that I am hoping I can get some advice for. 3 Months ago my wife's laptop hard drive died. No great big deal, brought a new drive and put it in and she was happy. Last month my desktop hard drive starting running very slow and making some sounds that were different from what I had heard before.
I got a external drive and copied over most of my files (I think it was most of them) that were important to me before it crapped its pants and totally failed. It eventually froze my pc and when i restarted the pc the drive started clicking.

So I now have 2 dead drives that are both clicking and thought it might be worth while to try and see if I could get them both working just enough to grab any files from my desktop that I might have missed. I never got a chance to get anything off the laptop.

I have some general electronic skills from a long time ago and still own a hot air station and a good quality soldering iron.

I tried to do a pcb swap and swapped over the bios chip but my drive still clicked. I put my original board from my desktop drive that had failed onto a spare drive I had and it worked. Yes the pcb numbers were the same So at least I know that the bios chip swap worked and ruled that out.

I have built a home made clean air box and have brought some drives that had bad sectors. I killed several of them to start with but the last couple I have removed the heads several times and reinstalled them and the drive still works.


The laptop drive is
Toshiba MQ01ABD100
AAT AA11/AXOA3M
HDKBB96T3A01 S
10 sep 2012
Made in China
PCB G003235C

According to donordrives the model number is critical, country and code is High priority.

I would assume that the numbers that would be most important to match would be Toshiba MQ01ABD100, PCB G003235C and i am going to guess at least most if not all of HDKBB96T3A01 S.



My Desktop drive is
WD10EADS-22M2B0
S/N WCAV559307..
DCM: HHRNNT2MHB
Date: 21 DEC 2009
Product of Thailand
PCB 2060-701640-002 REV A


I have this drive and even tho I am doubtful would this be able to be used for the heads
WD10EARS-00Y5B1
S/N WMAV523245..
DCM: DBRNNT2MGB
Date: 15 May 2010
Product of Thailand
PCB 2060-701640-002 REV A




Thank you for taking the time to read this and if anybody would happen to have some advice (besides sending the drives away) it would be greatly appreciated.

i would have used this one for a head swap
the question is if the head swap will be enough
the head swap is just the beginning
you'll - most likely - need firmware tools and hardware imager to complete the job

and here you have a match for the Toshiba drive (it not cheap, but didnt tried hard to find (picked the first match ) i believe its possible to find cheaper)

This was something that I was also concerned about. I know this is a pretty open sort of question and there would be no real easy answer.
Could this even be remotely possible to do without a hardware imager? 50/50 chance it would work or better?

Thanks for the reply Jermy

hardware imager will be your second problem
most likely you'll have to deal with the firmware first