Swapping PCBs on WD2500JS SATA drive-unsuccessful

[eljainc]

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

[pcimage]

Sounds like you need pro help

Try 300dollardatarecovery.com

Brian should be able to sort it for $300

[labtech]

Your pcb swap resulted in a high expectancy outcome. The firmware is different.

[eljainc]

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

[labtech]

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

[longlife]

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

[pepe]

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