Hi! I'm new to the forum, only having found it just now while trying to figure out the next step in trying to repair my hard drive. If there IS a next step.
I have a WD 3TB hard drive (WD30EZRZ) that abruptly died when I was attempting to install an additional drive. I'm not sure what happened, since I had everything powered down when I was working on my system. But regardless: the new HDD worked fine... And the old one was dead. No response when the system turned on. No drive noise or vibration. Nonfunctional even with new power cable, etc etc.
I did some research and decided to attempt a PCB swap. It seemed like a good idea at the time, erspecially since the drive hadn't been making any odd noises or the like prior to failure. I performed the swap without swapping the bios chip and lo and behold! The drive spun up when powered on! Of course, my computer BIOS and software didn't recognize it. So the next thing I did was bring the old and new PCBs to a local repair shop, and had the guy there swap out the 8-pin BIOS chips for me. (I have ZERO skill with a soldering iron.)
I brought the new PCB with the old BIOS chip back home, put everything back together again.... And still no luck. Hard drive spins when powered, but software / Motherboard BIOS does not recognize it. Under device manager it shows as "unknown device" and says it "was not migrated due to partial or ambiguous match." In the MB BIOS it shows a spot for it, but no information on the make/model/etc, just like before the chip swap.
I have, at this point, reached the limits of my knowledge base. Is there anything else that I, as an amateur, might be able to do to recover this hard drive? Any way to flash the bios with a new set of firmware or the like? Any wires to jiggle or incantations to speak while waving chicken bones over it? Any recommendations at all? There's nothing on it worth shelling out hundreds let alone thousands of dollars for data recovery. So if there's nothing more to be done for it in house, then I suppose that's the end of the line for this drive, alas.
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