WD1200BB-00GUC0

[larkim]

My father's disc (as above) has become completely unresponsive, not spinning up (tried in several machines).

I've taken off the PCB and could see what looked like visible over-heating damage to what I believe is the motor chip.

Image here http://flic.kr/p/aXKF5F on my flickr account.

I suspect a decent bet would be to swap the PCB on an identical disc, but I read that firmware may also differ even with the same model.

Can you advise what bit I should be looking for to try to get as close a match as possible - do I need to look in more detail than the 00GUC0 part of the model name, and where would I find it? Is it likely that any 00GUC0 version of the disc will have the same firmware, or at the very least have the same PCB from which I could lift the firmware? Could I cast my net more widely and get, say, a 00GUA0 model (which seem to be fairly freely available for about £20)?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!

Matt

[Cleanroom]

Find a matching board with the number 2060-701266-001 ( I am pretty sure that is the right board) and swap the small 8-pin chip label U12 over to the donor board and hope it works.

If you are not comfortable swapping the chip , find a local tech shop that will do it for you.

[larkim]

OK thanks, that's what I thought. Does anyone know of a good supplier in the UK?

Matt

[larkim]

Just thought I'd wrap this one up in case anyone else comes searching.

Just a few days after I'd bought a PCB from Dariius which was titled WD1200BB-00GUC0 I spotted on ebay a whole disk with that same reference.

When Darius' PCB arrived it had a different reference on the board than was on my actual drive so I waited until the whole drive arrived.

When that did, I removed the PCB from the dead drive and the ebay drive, and swapped over. I noticed that although the PCB boards were the same reference, one (my old one) used a samsung chip and the new one (from ebay) had a hynix chip. My old disk was malaysian manufactured, the ebay one was Taiwanese.

Swapped over the PCBs, plugged the drive into a USB caddy and the disk fired up straight away. No need to swap over the U15 chip or anything clever like that.

So I matched a WD1200BB-00GUC0 with a PCB from the same referenced drive, and it worked straight away.

Hope this helps someone!

Matt

[Cleanroom]

Glad it worked, you got lucky with matching firmwares.

Back it up now

[fzabkar]

I noticed that although the PCB boards were the same reference, one (my old one) used a samsung chip and the new one (from ebay) had a hynix chip.

Those are SDRAMs. These chips need not be the same -- they only need to have the same capacity (or maybe not in all cases ?).

You could use my database to compare them:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/HDD_RAM.html