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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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WD10EALS Blown PCB

June 5th, 2010, 14:13

something blew a fuse in my house and it seems it took out my 1TB Caviar blue (other drives and components survived)

i removed the faulty drive and it had that "burning" smell

so i took off the pcb to get a closer look at it and i noticed that the connections near a chip (Smooth L7251) had burnt out

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/9051 ... 051834.jpg
http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image ... oth_sm.jpg

anyway i bought another WD10EALS with the plan to get the broken drive working and copy the data off then swap the pcbs back to the original and then RMA the drive

i was lucky as the new one seemed like an almost exact match with the broken one both "WD10EALS-00Z8A0" and they where manufactured only 1 day apart

so i swapped out the pcb but it failed to work :(

does that mean the power surge or whatever caused the blackout took out more than just the pcb and the whole drive as well

what are my options?
i was thinking about buying another drive and seeing if that pcb works (i can return them easy enough or should i just accept that my 700gb of data i collected over the last 4 years is gone

:(

Re: WD10EALS Blown PCB

June 8th, 2010, 11:41

Each board carries adaptive data which is unique to its own drive.
In order to match a board for your drive, new PCB has to be reprogrammed with info from original PCB.

Re: WD10EALS Blown PCB

June 8th, 2010, 12:14

From the looks at the picture N1 ( bad quality ) it seems that u have a eeprom chip at position U12. That needs to be transfered from ur patient board onto the donor board. It contains adaptive info Hddspecialist was talking about.

Re: WD10EALS Blown PCB

June 8th, 2010, 13:21

It is not gone for good. You can try pcimage her is in UK and should be able to handle this one for you if you give him both drives. He can give free estimate on this one. Should not cost that much if the only problem is your PCB on this one. Contact him and see what he says to you on this.

Re: WD10EALS Blown PCB

June 9th, 2010, 9:26

If you are not experienced in soldering, then ask your local TV/AV repair shop.

See this thread:
http://www.deadharddrive.com/forums/vie ... =9531#9531

The OP writes that s/he "took the board to an electronics repair store and for $20 the ROM chip was swapped. "
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