Hi,

By the way great forum found this on Google thx HDD GURU's

I have a WD3200AAKS with some imp data I would like to recover so any help provided will be highly appreciated

here is the issue

Drive spins up fine no clicking noise or any noise for that matter except for the spindles spinning,
hdd light stays solid for a while than noting happens the drive is not detected.

So after reading a few recommendation on this forum I ordered and received identical drive
tested it works great so swapped the circuit board / controller on the drive and no change.

seem the drive has lost start up information.

any idea for a fix? or should I contact Ontrack or one of those companies?

thx

Manish

Ima ignorant when it comes to states , however i am sure shipping within USA is cheap. Before going to Ontrack ill suggest u try Jono ATS from this forum ( Atlanta ) I believe he has a free diagnostics and his prices are lower then the average DR in states / Canada. The fact that u put a donor board on ur patient and it acted the same ( no clicks no id ) raises some questions. Diagnostics is needed.

You problem can not be done with a PCB swap alone. The PCB has adaptive data to spin up your drive and read heads on this one. I think they are right contact Jono here on the Forum or there is also Thatdellguy and even Quasimodo also all in the US that are top experts that can handle this one for you. You can send a PM to them or if you are new this one might not work think you have to have so much time on here and so many posts before you can do this one I will see if one will contact you.

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Iorana Haraharaini

What do you mean by "controller"?

If you are referring to the PCB as a controller, then you will need to transfer the Marvell MCU's "adaptive" data to your donor PCB. I'm assuming that location U12 is vacant.

OTOH, if you mean that you swapped the PCB + controller (ie MCU), then it may be that your original MCU is faulty.

BTW, from whom did you purchase your replacement PCB? Some suppliers will advertise their wares as "for data recovery only", which is a deceptive way of saying that "we know this is a good board but it may not work for you". They know full well that a typical end user will be stuck with a board that they can't use. In any case, how many end users would pay for a board if not for the purpose of data recovery?

Other suppliers are more honest. They will actually tell you, prior to purchase, in plain view on their web sites, that certain boards will not work without a firmware transfer. Moreover, these same suppliers typically include such a transfer service for US$10.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Not necessarily true. There are many suppliers who are just hdd part suppliers without in depth knowledge about what is and what is not compatible. They just strip parts off drives and sell them as they are since there is a demand for it.

Additionally, it is not necessarily a vendor's duty to teach one how things work as they may be wrong/mistaken themselves due to various unknown variables.

Could vendors advertise using a better choice of words? Sure.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts