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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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WD10JMVW PCB replacement, can I swap the ROM chips?

January 13th, 2025, 16:41

I have a WD10JMVW with a 2060-77961-001 REVA PCB. It's currently responding extremely slowly with ddrescue reporting an average transfer rate of 9KB/s. From my searching it seems like this is a common occurrence with WD drives. Unfortunately for troubleshooting, the PCB only has a USB connection.
Following this thread: https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=27819 it would seem that the PCB can be swapped out with a 2060-771960. I happen to have another drive with PCB 2060-771960-000 REVA. However my searches also indicate that the data on my WD10JMVW is most likely encrypted and I would need to transfer the ROM from it's board to the donor board. I believe the ROM is U12 on both boards.

So what I'd like to know is:
Can I desolder the ROM chip from the WD10JMVW PCB and just straight swap it on to the donor board? Or do I need to do some changes to the ROM data for it to work? (Both ROM chips have the same capacity and pinout)

Will swapping the boards solve the slow response and transfer issue it's currently having or is there more that I'll need to do to get the data off the drive in a reasonable time?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Re: WD10JMVW PCB replacement, can I swap the ROM chips?

January 13th, 2025, 17:50

Hello,

pcb swap with rom trasplant works, but on its own it won't fix the slow problem. (See slow respond fix).
Be aware that the rom contains critical adaptive data, if it gets damaged recovery will be expensive.

pepe

Re: WD10JMVW PCB replacement, can I swap the ROM chips?

January 14th, 2025, 7:32

nebular wrote:Will swapping the boards solve the slow response and transfer issue it's currently having or is there more that I'll need to do to get the data off the drive in a reasonable time?

No.
After swapping PCB's and transfer ROM's you will need to apply the slow fix solution and prepare a destination working drive to clone on it.
As Mr. Pepe mentioned (beware of transferring ROM's).

Good luck

Re: WD10JMVW PCB replacement, can I swap the ROM chips?

January 14th, 2025, 19:30

Swapping over the ROM chip to the donor PCB was successful, as was applying the slow response fix using HDDSuperClone. I was able to successfully mount the filesystem and see the contents, and now ddrescue is making an image of the drive at ~100MB/s.

Thank you all for the help.

Re: WD10JMVW PCB replacement, can I swap the ROM chips?

January 14th, 2025, 19:32

:good:

pepe
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