Can you still swap controllers on newer same hard drives?

[diske]

Hi All

In the past, I've swapped controller boards on similiar models and have resolved some communication problems to drives.
Had a friend force a sata power connector onto his HD and it fried a small black chip on the controller board... I verified it by plugging it in the correct way, and it started smoking again =/

I recently purchased a working 400gb wd hd, same exact model that i have here, to steal the controller from, but to my dismay, the controller board has a different part number on it! Ahh. none the less, cannot get to data, data recovery programs cannot even see it. I stumbled across someone saying "New board won't help due to unique microcode stored on your original board. Special equipment is needed for that." and now im left wondering, what exactly is this unique microcode?

Is this the case for all newish hard drives? or just western digital ones now-a-days?
Any insight would be helpful, about burnt out reading and reading... about this burnt out micro controller

Thanks for reading

[drc]

Should be easy to fix.

Depends on how new it is. Current generation WD drives store unique info in the MCU, which is not easily transferable.

[drc]

Not even pins, is BGA.

[BlackST]

Wasn't it so simple?

[Russwinters]

Time to break out your X-ray stations! Hooray!



HDD manufacturers moto: We make costs for recovering your data MORE expensive!