Hello,

We had a WD2500JS SATA hard drive that was not too old (3-5 years perhaps) and one day one of my colleagues noted
that there was a BSOD on the screen. After shutting down the workstation and restarting, it reported that there was
no SATA drive on channel 0.

Upon inspecting the hard drive, I noticed that it was not spinning up at all, no power was getting to the drive electronics.
A small burn mark on the external PCB was visible at close inspection.

Since we did not have a recent back up of the data, I thought I would try a trick that I used to use years ago with ATA/IDE
hard drives: Finding an identical (or nearly identical) hard drive and swap the PCB board.

I did this and indeed the drive did power up. However, the BIOS showed a HDD failure. The PC BIOS reported this drive
as a WDC ROM Model HAWK instead of the proper WDC WD2500JS-98MHB0 which would have been the true BIOS signature.

I removed the drive and connected it to a USB-SATA converter. I connected this to another PC running Windows and it detected
the hardware and disk drive, however it was again reported as a WDC ROM Model HAWK. No drive letter appeared in the Windows Explorer
and DISKMGMT.MSC did not recognize the drive, even after a complete rescan/refresh.

Visually the PCB boards look the same, they show the same revision on the PCB side:

The original drive shows the following:

MDL: WD2500JS-75NCB3
Date: 29 JUL 2007
DCM: DSBHNTJCHN
LBA: 488281250

The swapped drive has the following:

MDL: WD2500J8-98MHB0
Date: 18 MAY 2007
DCM: H8BHNT2AHN
LBA: 488397168


I notice there are some jumpers on the drive, the default is to have J1/J2 jumpered, enabling SSC (spread spectrum clocking). I tried
removing this jumper and also the other combinations (PM2: controlled spin-up, 150MB/s transfer speed). I did not see any changes
to the recognition of the drive when these were changed.

My question is: is there any way to get the original drive working again by using this PCB or do I need to have a PCB which is verbatim
to the original one?

I would rather not have to resort to a data recovery service unless it is not expensive (more than a couple hundred dollars).

Thanks so much.

Mike

Sounds like you need pro help

Try 300dollardatarecovery.com

Brian should be able to sort it for $300

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PC Image Data Recovery
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Your pcb swap resulted in a high expectancy outcome. The firmware is different.

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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

Is there a way I can swap the firmware? I have heard chip U12 has this firmware.

Sure, if the IC is fine, chances are favorable.

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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

but the pcb structure of the PCBs are different. So U12 rom replacement will NOT be succesful.

I would be careful with any drive using pcb 701335 (and 701265, 701292 and perhaps a couple of others of the same era), because they are prone to fail in such a way that they supply overvoltage to the preamp on the -5V line, which can produce a range of problems from temporary read failures to permanent data damage by write channel and preamp damage.

so i advise checking -5V on both pcbs, and not only just check, but let it powered on (only the pcb without hda) for a couple of minutes and check the voltage for runaways. Using an oscilloscope is the best because you can detect short spikes and slow changes too.

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery