Hey All,
I have a couple questions regarding the repairing of a drive I have.

MDL: WD3200AAKS-00SBA0
Date: 26 APR 2007
DCM: HHRCHA2AAN

The drive was in an external enclosure connected to my friends MAC hosting his 15K + Itunes library
He created a playlist and when he went to start it, media not accessible etc... error in Itunes.
The drive was no longer seen in OSX
He restarted and still not seen.
I pulled the drive from the enclosure and hooked it into my pc, the drive did not spin up when power was applied to it.

The drive was not dropped, hit, etc.. nor showed any signs of failure before it failed.


I took the drive to a local data recovery company who did free evaluations before giving me a price of $800.00 + 140.00 for parts to fix it.
the owner stated that the drives firmware no longer had the correct value of this drive in it and would have to have the PCB swapped (the 140.00) and cleanroom access (where the 800.00 comes in I guess)

I told him i will pass on the recovery and brought it home. Before I left he said if I wanted to save on the parts cost i could find an identical drive on Ebay, internet, etc. as long as the model # matched he could use the pcb to fix the bad drive.


Does what he told me sound right? If he just needed to swap the pcb, why would he need a cleanroom to do it?
Is there a way i can get power to the motor to spin the drive and let me extract the data?


Sorry for the long winded post

Appreciate any insight,
Mfk

Hmm, cleanroom sounds a little OTT.

But you would need specialist equipment to program a new PCB to suit your drive, as the adaptive (unique) info is inside the main chip on these drives. Unlike earlier drives which had an 8-pin chip with this data in that you could transfer.

I respectfully suggest you take it to another pro for 2nd opinion. Anyone on this forum near this guy?

IF it's "just" a PCB fault then it shouldn't be too expensive.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Cool appreciate the reply.

Yeah I figured I would go to this other recovery outfit here in Charlotte ( Data Recovery Group) on Monday, they offer a free eval so it won't be anything out of my pocket except gas money for the moment.

If there is someone in the Charlotte vicinity who has the experience to diagnose this please let me know.


Mfk


Off topic a little,

So with these new drives the firmware is not just housed on the pcb but somewhere on platters themselves?

PM sent

Yes, the firmware is in the PCB and some parts in the platter.

Trying a lot of company is a little bit risky, because sooner or later you will find one wich will get the data, and destroy the chance for others when you refuse the quote, keep this in mind.
I have seen this a lot of times....

Janos

Anyone on here near to this guy?

Someone that won't rip him of to the tune of nearly a thousand bucks for a PCB problem, assuming that's all it is.

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

I am in Texas and can try to help you out. From the situation it does sound like it is just a bad board, and just needs a new board and the adaptive/Rom information rebuilt. This is of course that the first company you sent it to did not go all out and take things out of the drive and make things worse. Normally we do not do free Evals for previously opened media, but I will do it for you if you want. I will also give you a fair price on it, if the drive is recoverable. If we get nothing, you pay nothing



If you are interested, send me a pm