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Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 6th, 2009, 8:30

Hello,
My WD1001FALS encontered a power surge and the pcb fried out. The pcb does not seem to have the U12 Rom on it. Any advice on where the ROM is located and how to swap it out to a donor PCB?

Image

Thanks the input!

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 6th, 2009, 8:44

In the IC with the big 'M'... Bad news eh ?

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 6th, 2009, 8:57

If you have expensive tools you may not need to swap chip. Is this a ROYL drive?

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 6th, 2009, 9:47

On that model the damaged over the spindle controller could be damaged the MHA too unfortunely

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 6th, 2009, 10:41

beto wrote:On that model the damaged over the spindle controller could be damaged the MHA too unfortunely



Then you have real problems.

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 6th, 2009, 10:47

And I'm seeing quite a few cases with damaged PCB and preamp on WD drives.

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 6th, 2009, 11:34

wolfenstein123 wrote:Hello,
My WD1001FALS encontered a power surge and the pcb fried out. The pcb does not seem to have the U12 Rom on it. Any advice on where the ROM is located and how to swap it out to a donor PCB?

Image

Thanks the input!


I have dealt with this one, last week. I'm not sure it's ROYL arch. or not, but ROM is inside MCU, that's for sure. When the PCB fried, this is gonna be a PITA job if you don't have proper tools. With WD drives, many times I encountered situations where the Marvel MCU is dead, preamp is gone too. This is the worst scenario

*Can we recreate ROM from SA for this model, manually with hex editor ?
+ Yes, theoretically possible if you know which part of each modules must be put where. I had enough headache using this "Rambo XII" method. Remind you, you'll have to have access to write to SA after successfully write ROM also, otherwise the previously painful task of recreating ROM will be useless.

*Will PCB hot swap work ?
+ NO. Not a chance against this one

*Will PCB cold swap work ?
+YES, if you know what to do next

*Any other way to recover data easier besides using expensive tools ?
+ No, as far as my knowledge. Except you really are a "HDD Guru"


Conclusion : :mrgreen:

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 10th, 2009, 17:43

Apart from the expensive ideas, it is worth trying to replace U1 and check the TVS diodes and fuses, and other components.
if they look fine, case might be solved by swapping U1 if u are lucky enough.

pepe

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 10th, 2009, 18:28

Agree with pepe, this pcb is quite simpe.
In this way, more easy to rebuild the whole pcb instead of replacing the MCU without proper tools....

If the MCU is damaged, than..... :)

Anyway, use some protections for trying!

Janos

Re: Western Digital WD1001FALS ROM Location

March 10th, 2009, 18:47

It would be safer to replace U1, the diodes and Q2, the low ohm resistors etc. but is it worth ?
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