I've got a couple of drives which are damaged that I would like to practice on in an attempt to get familiar with the salvation data HDD doctor suite.

The drives are both WD 5000AAVS 500GB SATA II.

One of them has been opened, its covered in fingerprints and the heads are all bent etc. but the controller board appears to be intact.

The other drive casing is intact and has not been opened but the contoller board has been cut in half! (nothing to do with me, these are old drives from the IT dept!!).

I have been led to believe by the guy who damaged the drives that they were fully working, just retired, before he messed about with them out of bordom.

I've been reading through the WD doctor user guide, but it's not too easy to follow due to the bad translation from Chinese to English.

The circuit boards both look like they are the same part number, which is as follows:

Snapped in half one:
2060-701537-004 REV A (Embossed into circuit board).
2061-701537-Q00 AD XC 6P08 3QNF J 0003220 9223 (white label on circuit board).

Intact Board:
2060-701537-004 REV A (Embossed into circuit board).
2061-701537-Q00 AD XH ZZ8J 0635 1 000 102 0 8 121 (white label on circuit board)

So far I have attemted to follow the salvation data guide on how to recover the ROM firmware from the service area.

I have placed the 'good' circuit board onto the 'good' drive chasis and connected it up to the hd doctor for WD, the drive does spin up, but makes a clicking noise every few seconds, which from reading the forums, leads me to believe that it is normal behaviour for a drive + board mis-match?

The status of the hd doctor software goes from 'busy' when power is applied to either 'error' or 'ready'. If the status shows ready, I use the 'load from hdd' option (tried both fast and slow mode) it always results in a status of 'error', I cannot then do anything else.

Does anyone have any suggestions about this?

It sure has been a learning curve so far and I was a little disappointed that this did not work after all the research that I did!

Thanks vey much,

J

Hi,

The good drive chasis's heads are gone. So don't disappointed.

Good luck.

Hi Unknown,

By 'gone' do you mean that they are defective by the sound that they are making or because I dont have the original controller board? I was under the impression that the salvation data WD doctor was able to read the service area and extarct the adaptive data modules from the 'good' chassis by placing a 'similar' working circuit board onto the 'good' chasis, then re-generate a ROM that can be written to the 'similar' circuit board.

As far as I know, the only damage to these drive is the chasis of the one that has been opened (which I would say is damaged beyond repair - unless salvation data make a miracle recovery tool ) and the circuit board of the other drive, which then leaves me with one perfect chassis and one perfect controller board.

Any further suggestions?

Thanks again,

J

I mean the original defective PCB lead to damaged pre-amp.


That's true, but in the case where no damage to the media ( Head/s, pre-amp, SA...etc ).

Ah!

The now broken PCB was removed from the 'good' chassis before it was broken, and it was never re-fitted to the 'good' chassis.

Does that make any difference?

Thanks,

J

@OP I have two suggestions:
1) Purchase English written manuals for SD. Search the forum for "Ann" or "Anne".

2) I think you should not assume that the PCB and drive are good. Though there are some easier tests to get an idea if each are good, the best approach for your particular situation and goal is to acquire another known working compatible drive. Use that to understand how a good drive should operate and then check each of the other components are good. Once establishing they are good, then you can make one good drive out of the two broken ones, given that certain damage does not prevent that from happening.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts