Hi guys, I had a dead western digital 80 gb drive that I wanted to get the data off ( not extremely important though )

I had a donor drive laying around with the same full model number and the same pcb number.

I swapped the pcb and the patient drive started spinning but giving the wrong info in the bios. so then I swapped the U12 chip and now the donor pcb is dead but the patients pcb came back to life with the donor u12. patients pcb which was dead before works just fine with the donor drive but when I put it back on the original drive it is giving wrong info in bios. what else can I try? is the original ROM bad to cause the pcb not powering up?

your Patient Drive ROM was corrupt..
there is still a chance to save data from such drive. but u need special tool to do such job.
without tool seem impossible...

_________________
Спасибо
СУТИОНО / АПИНГ

Thank you for your reply. I think the ROM chip is completely dead and causing the pcb not to power up at all. is it possible to reprogram a new or donor ROM chip to work with the drive or it has to be the original.

Depends upon the drive family. If the main chip is WDCxxx then shouldn't be a problem. If Marvell, then iffy because adaptive data is contained within ROM. Some of the more recent models allow rebuilding of ROM from disk surface. The latter procedure requires professional assistance.

ROM chip doesn't have to be dead, if sufficiently corrupt the drive will not even try to start. Think of it like the BIOS chip on your motherboard.

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

But to fix the corruption you need professional help .