My father's disc (as above) has become completely unresponsive, not spinning up (tried in several machines).

I've taken off the PCB and could see what looked like visible over-heating damage to what I believe is the motor chip.

Image here http://flic.kr/p/aXKF5F on my flickr account.

I suspect a decent bet would be to swap the PCB on an identical disc, but I read that firmware may also differ even with the same model.

Can you advise what bit I should be looking for to try to get as close a match as possible - do I need to look in more detail than the 00GUC0 part of the model name, and where would I find it? Is it likely that any 00GUC0 version of the disc will have the same firmware, or at the very least have the same PCB from which I could lift the firmware? Could I cast my net more widely and get, say, a 00GUA0 model (which seem to be fairly freely available for about £20)?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

Matt

Find a matching board with the number 2060-701266-001 ( I am pretty sure that is the right board) and swap the small 8-pin chip label U12 over to the donor board and hope it works.

If you are not comfortable swapping the chip , find a local tech shop that will do it for you.

OK thanks, that's what I thought. Does anyone know of a good supplier in the UK?

Matt

Just thought I'd wrap this one up in case anyone else comes searching.

Just a few days after I'd bought a PCB from Dariius which was titled WD1200BB-00GUC0 I spotted on ebay a whole disk with that same reference.

When Darius' PCB arrived it had a different reference on the board than was on my actual drive so I waited until the whole drive arrived.

When that did, I removed the PCB from the dead drive and the ebay drive, and swapped over. I noticed that although the PCB boards were the same reference, one (my old one) used a samsung chip and the new one (from ebay) had a hynix chip. My old disk was malaysian manufactured, the ebay one was Taiwanese.

Swapped over the PCBs, plugged the drive into a USB caddy and the disk fired up straight away. No need to swap over the U15 chip or anything clever like that.

So I matched a WD1200BB-00GUC0 with a PCB from the same referenced drive, and it worked straight away.

Hope this helps someone!

Matt

Glad it worked, you got lucky with matching firmwares.

Back it up now

Those are SDRAMs. These chips need not be the same -- they only need to have the same capacity (or maybe not in all cases ?).

You could use my database to compare them:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_RAM.html

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