Dear community,
after following misc posts across these forums for some time which had helped me a lot in the past, I chose to register today as I'm experiencing issues with a defunct Toshiba MQ01USB100.
I had a similar case a few years ago and remembered that I once successfully converted the USB-based-PCB to a SATA one transplanting IC602 as e.g. mentioned in
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?t=28898 or
https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=26163.
The drive that had become inaccessible:
Toshiba MQ01USB100
Drive Rev.: AZA AA00/AX001U
Date: JUL 2014
PCB-Rev: G003250A
Looking for a donor I got a:
Toshiba MQ01ABD100
Drive Rev.: AAT AB31/AX1P4M
Date: MAR 2016
PCB-Rev: G003235C
I checked the donor drive and it seemed to work without issues.
Searching the internet gave no evidence that a conversion from G003250A to G003235C was tried before or that it had worked.
After transplanting IC602 from patient to donor however, the hdd still refuses to become recognizable and makes a series of clicking noises quite soon (~2-3 sec.) after spinning up. it used to click before but AFAIR the clicking started at a later stage and sounded somewhat less distressing. To me, there were no acoustic signs of loose or sticky heads at any time thats why i tried the conversion.
I recorded the series of clicking sounds and encoded with Opus-codec and put it in attached .zip as neither .opus nor .mp3 seems to be an allowed extension for uploads on hddguru. Unfortunately I didn't record the disk's sounds with it original USB-board...
I've also measured the current during the initial spinup-phase as seen in attached image.
Now I'm wondering where to head next; any suggestions on what to try? I'm wondering if the conversion itself worked and e.g. the heads are an issue with this disk. Hope there is some hope left?
Cheers!