Hi all,

First of all, I'm new on this forum. I've read a lot of topics and post for the repair for a Barracuda ST500DM002. It is an F3 line.

I would like to have some feedback on my plan of action.

Situation:
Drive doesn't spin. I have got several drives with the same pcb and that are a match with the Donor Drive Donor Matching Guide. I've put the bad pcb on a working drive, and it won't spin either, so there is something wrong with the pcb of the defective drive.

Question:
- soldering and transferring bios chip is the only option / is the way to go?
- backing up rom settings and loading on new pcb is that in a way possible?

Just to be sure before I head to a store where they have a hot air gun..

You could use a programmer with a SOIC clip to read the chip, but then you have the issue on how to write it to the new PCB.

But if you have a TRUSTED soldering guy then it would be easier, if he/she messes it up though it's pretty much game over!

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Have you tried the donor PCB on the patient drive just to make sure it spins. If the original PCB had some sort of electrical failure/surge it may have affected the read-write heads inside the drive.

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

I have just tried it, it spins and makes clicking noises, not the normal sounds of a working drive (but that might be because rom isn't swapped?

Yes that can be caused by an incorrect ROM. At least the drive spins which is a good sign.

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

if you got maching donor pcb...
you are lucky only PCB. without Head+pcb.

be carefull with soldering work.

Just to let you know, chip was soldiered to donor pcb, drive was repaired! I've made a clone so that old drive could be destroyed. Thanks!