Hello, I didn't know where else to go to find the best people who knew about this sort of thing so here I am.

My dilemma is that I had a pcb board on a hard drive start smoking, you know, the one with 15 years of pictures on it. I pulled it out and removed the board to find a burnt out chip. I did the quintessential moron thing and went to Ebay, and bought a board with the same model number. I put it on, plugged it back in to my computer and it wouldn't spin. In my disgust, I freaked out and threw away the old pcb. A few days later, after the trash had been picked up of course, I take the drive to my local pc repair shop, pay a $65 fee and have them look at it. They tell me they couldn't retrieve data from it, so for another $120 they tell me they will try a "proprietary software" method to retrieve the data. That doesn't work, so the guy says I have two options from here. They can send it to a hard drive repair guy in Atlanta and see if he can fix it, or send it to some lab in California where they will disassemble the disk and recover the data from the platters which he warns would likely be a very expensive process.

I choose the option of sending the drive to Atlanta since its only costing me $40 shipping. He calls back a few minutes later saying that his repair guy wants the old pcb since he needs the ROM chip off of it. Obviously, I tell him that out of ignorance I threw it away, and he says they will see what they can do.

So after my long drawn out story, I am just curious if I am wasting money here. Without the old pcb ROM is the drive essentially unrepairable? I've spent several hours reading posts about this topic on this site and others, but I can't seem to find anything that provides the answer to my specific problem. I've read that ROM can be re-programmed and then other places I've read that even in the event that its re-programmed the data on the disk still won't be accessible.

The pictures are obviously very very important to me and my wife, but I don't know if they are thousands of dollars worth of important. I just don't want to be spinning my wheels while money is falling out of my wallet.

Any information, knowledge, or advice anyone can give to my situation would be MOST appreciated. Thank you in advance for your time.

Oh and by the way, the drive is a WD Blue 500GB Desktop Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 16MB Cache 3.5 Inch - WD5000AAKX - OEM that I bought in 2012.

Also I apologize if this is the wrong section to post this in, if so, please feel free to move it to the proper area.

What is the full model number including the letters/numbers after the dash? It should be something like WD500AAKX-25LBA0 (just an example).

Those numbers at the end actually tell us more than the first part.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Agree.

Lost original PCB is not the end of the world on this model, unlike new Seagate drives amongst others.

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http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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Thank you very much for your response. I will call the shop and ask if they were able to get the drive to spin. I should have asked when I talked to him earlier, but given my ignorance about HDD hardware I just didn't know to ask. At least if I know they were able to get it to spin then the pre-amp isn't the problem, and has a chance to be fixed.

So to update on this, I contacted the guy at the shop yesterday and he told he his "guy" in Atlanta said it wasn't possible to repair the drive without the ROM from the old board. Obviously from what you guys have said here and from even my own modest amount of research I know this to be incorrect. I feel like I've been "had" after spending what now totals almost $400.

I'm out of town until next Friday, but is there anyone that you guys recommend I can send this drive to that's trustworthy and won't gouge me out of even more money?

Well,
Contact a good DR tech from hddguru local to your place .If you were in india i would have done this for approx 300 dollars even if it needed a head swap if HSA was burned .ROM regeneration in WDC is not that hard .Many other techniques like changing rom and overlay modules also works if you know how to handle it .

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Regards
Amarbir S Dhillon , Chandigarh Data Recovery Labs [India]
Logical,Semi Physical And Physical Data Recovery
Website-> http://www.chandigarhdatarecovery.com

Isn't Jon from Datasavers in Atlanta? He's definitely one of the best, so I'm 99% sure it wasn't him who worked on this.

Yep good advice! Send it to Jon. I understand his company is an approved WD partner.

International postage round trip isnt too bad! In Atlanta Jon does good work.

Actually there are some WD families which don't have ROM modules in SA, mostly on USB models. The modules just say "NOT_INIT" and are blank. However it isn't the ones without an external ROM. And even then if you can find enough ROM codes to try, you'll likely find one that works.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

Thank you for all the replies. I currently live in Memphis. Is there anyone you guys would recommend around this area of the US that could possibly help with my situation? If Datasavers is the best option though, I'd gladly send it there.

Another update on this. I picked up the drive and got a second opinion from another data recovery firm here in Memphis. They said the drive spins and they can fix it, but quoted me $500 to repair. They said the ROM could be restored from the SA on the platters just like you guys said.

Is that a fair price for that kind of work? Seems extremely expensive for what essentially is a relatively simple procedure.

IMHO it is a reasonable price for the work (perhaps a little on the high side). You have to remember that data recovery companies use a lot of expensive equipment in order to recover data from hard drives. Recovering the ROM is not as simple as a procedure as you might think. The equipment alone to do this type of work (PC-30000 is about $7,500. You are also paying for the time and experience of the engineer responsible for the job. We take data recovery (and protecting your data while doing it) very seriously and it does come at a price. Hope that helps.

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

+1

than DIY

$500 sounds pretty typical. I charge $450 for cases like this here. While it may turn out to be a "simple" procedure, there's too many unknowns. I always price assuming on the potential to have bad sectors, the need to purchase another PCB, possibility of heads failing while extracting data, etc. Just to rebuild the ROM might be simple, but many things can (and often do) go wrong during the process resulting in extra work/cost.

If you just wanted the ROM rebuilt it could be cheaper, but I always quote for a complete recovery and I assume the guy who quoted you did too.

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company