Recovering Data from Western Digital Hard Drive

[eska123]

Hi,

Hoping I could have some guidance here.

I had a WD hard drive for about 4 or 5 years that got fried due to a power surge about 15 months ago. I know for a fact it was a power surge / frying due to the burnt smell... this basically "killed the drive", the chipset was DOA.

I recently purchased a WD drive (with exact same chipset #) off ebay and replaced the circuit board. The HD now loads up and is spinning fine but the Motherboard has trouble detecting it. I think this might be a firmware problem but I am hoping there is an easier solution.

The HD is detected as a "hard disk" by the mother board, and shows up in BIOS but with a "fake WD" name. It is not detected by Windows. It does not detect the exact model #, but it does show that there is a "hard disk" in the SATA port that it's plugged into

Is there a way to simply use a SATA to USB converter to now have this hard drive readable? Can i make a simple change to the BIOS settings so that the drive is fully readable?

As far as I know there are no hardware issues, no sounds or anything that would point to mechanical damage

Thanks for your help!

[pcimage]

You cannot simply exchange the PCB on modern drives, they're programmed with specific adaptive info unique to the drive.

You didn't specify the model so we cannot tell you what needs to be done to transfer this info across (if it's possible)

Best thing you can do is post a photo of the component side of the poorly PCB.