Had some spare time so i pulled this from storage to play around with.

Drive is detected by the bios and windows, but the computer responds very slowly when connected and powered. tried installing win 10 on it, which took about 6 hours and at the end failed due to data corruption.

Checked the 5v and 12v diodes and both appear fine. Also, checked the oscillator at 25mhz. The drive motor terminals are only getting 2.8v from the smooth (L7251 3.1). Two HDDs are 6v and a third was tested at 3.8v to the drive motor

Inclined to suspect the smooth motor controller which looks fine (no burn holes)....anyone have an idea on this? Thanks for any help.

Patient: WD10EADS w/ 2060-701640-002 REVA

From looking at the variations of the 2060-701640-xxx I can get the ICs I need and swap them over, BUT if I could just swap out the PCB I wouldn't risk the damage. Can I swap my bios onto a 001 or a 003 revision? The only difference I could see from a002 (patient) to a 003 (potential donor) was the memory utilized.

please explain the term "spare time "

If the drive is seen and it was able to partially install windows, the PCB, associated chips or motor are not the issue.
Download CrystalDiskInfo and see what the SMART report says.

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HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

Connected the patient-booting from good working drive-came back 45minutes later and PC still booting. Remove patient and computer boots fine. Practically impossbile to practically do anything with this drive

As this data is not important to you (I presume).
Try and make an image or clone with DDRescue or HDDSuperclone in Linux.

_________________
HDD, SSD, Flash and RAID Data Recovery
Founder of The Data Recovery Professionals Group

Most likely the drive has weak / dirty heads and / or stuffed RELO list.

It's a candidate for pro recovery, if the data is important.

If not, have fun experimenting.

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http://www.datasaversllc.com

weak/dirty heads...was hoping for something external. data i have no interest in...found in a garbage can