Need to access WD1600 one last time. "Clicking of death"

[rickest]

I got a very old WD1600 drive here from 2005 with important information on it that I need to access.

It has been connected to a part of a server as expandable storage as a placeholder and forgotten about and now it has failed.

Yeah stupid to have something important on an old drive but lesson learned and now switching storage to 6 "Samsung 980 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB" to never deal with mechanical hard drives again.

Anyway, this drive had the "clicking of death" and at first I thought it was the heads or arms scraping against the disc but I did open it up and saw no damage at all.

Here I got two of these exactly the same drives one of them still working so I did a clone of the working drive and then I tried to swap the PCB(2060-701335-005 REV A) from the good to the faulty drive and connect it again and I could hear it spin up without the "clicking of death" noise but there is no connection and windows or bios can't seem find it. Whats the solution to this?

If its bios chip swap, can I just get rid of the chip on it by melting the solder or pins from the chip and then duct tape the chip from faulty board with the bios I need on there and run it for an hour to do a successful clone or do I really need to solder it back on the board again, they don't even look soldered on like other PCB's it looks more like the chip is floating and soldered in the sides.

Please help me out with some guidance and information about these if you have it! Thank you.

[northwind]

I just hope you're trolling.

[rickest]

I just hope you're trolling.

Not trolling at all.Need help with a solution, removing the bios chip I can probably manage but to solder it back on with an old equipment kit I can tell I would mess something up.

So will the duct tape solution work if I manage to line the connectors up properly?

[DRUG]

This is wrong on so many levels xD

I'll just give a hint because I wont even touch on the "clicking of death" story.

Hint: the drives you are using now... Just do regular backups.

[ddrecovery]

Yeah stupid to have something important on an old drive but lesson learned and now switching storage to 6 "Samsung 980 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB" to never deal with mechanical hard drives again.

1. You need professional help now you have opened your drive.
2. How do you have your SSDs configured.
3. Failure rate of an SSD is about the same as a HDD.
4. 95% of HDDs are recoverable, only 50% of SSDs are recoverable.

[pepe]

The rom chip needs to be soldered. Period. Duct tape is OK for everything else you can think of but not for this one.
Data may be corrupt due to the high suppy voltage the pcb fed to the preamp, on top of contamination that probably entered when the drive was opened. Heads are also prone to get misaligned when the lid is taken off (on these drives at least).

+1 for what ddrecovery said.

pepe

[dick]

Sorry to say but your plan of action is the equivalent of performing a complex medical intervention using a bread knife with the patient laying on a sun bed.

[rickest]

I just hope you're trolling.

I just hope you're trolling.

Not trolling at all.Need help with a solution, removing the bios chip I can probably manage but to solder it back on with an old equipment kit I can tell I would mess something up.

So will the duct tape solution work if I manage to line the connectors up properly?

This is wrong on so many levels xD

I'll just give a hint because I wont even touch on the "clicking of death" story.

Hint: the drives you are using now... Just do regular backups.

Yeah stupid to have something important on an old drive but lesson learned and now switching storage to 6 "Samsung 980 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD 2TB" to never deal with mechanical hard drives again.

1. You need professional help now you have opened your drive.
2. How do you have your SSDs configured.
3. Failure rate of an SSD is about the same as a HDD.
4. 95% of HDDs are recoverable, only 50% of SSDs are recoverable.

The rom chip needs to be soldered. Period. Duct tape is OK for everything else you can think of but not for this one.
Data may be corrupt due to the high suppy voltage the pcb fed to the preamp, on top of contamination that probably entered when the drive was opened. Heads are also prone to get misaligned when the lid is taken off (on these drives at least).

+1 for what ddrecovery said.

pepe

Sorry to say but your plan of action is the equivalent of performing a complex medical intervention using a bread knife with the patient laying on a sun bed.

None of these comments were of any help to me but I guess its not really that easy to tell someone should just go do something like this over a forum. With that said, it worked.

Today after some back and forth thinking about if I should proceed with this or not I decided to goahead and its done. I swapped the bios chip with a heatgun and put a rectangle strip of duct tape on it to hold it in place and applied some weight on it to press it down and then poked each connector with a soldering iron and its working now im doing a clone of it as im writing this message.

I did watch some youtube tutorials on soldering PCB and also tried it out on an old laptop motherboard removing chips and putting them back on there, my tips to others before doing something like this is to practice on some old piece of PCB and do the same. This will give you some experience and prepare you for the best way to go about it and it was not that hard to do but if you don't have steady hands you are at risk of burning the components too much, or damage the PCB in other ways, also don't flip the chip, put it back on there the same direction it was. Good luck.

Also: Don't let this post get your hopes up too much going the DIY route, there are situations where you are going to need professional help for sure, and I was not sure it would work.

[pepe]

thanks for the kind words, they warmed my heart for today

In fact, some of it helped you a lot coz you apparently soldered the chip on the new board and got it working. Why did you not use DT at the end?
It's a bit of luck as well coz you could have smashed it with the contamination as well.

pepe

[dick]

Anyway, this drive had the "clicking of death" and at first I thought it was the heads or arms scraping against the disc but I did open it up and saw no damage at all.

And then you put the cover back on and later there were no issues?

I swapped the bios chip with a heatgun and put a rectangle strip of duct tape on it to hold it in place and applied some weight on it to press it down and then poked each connector with a soldering iron and its working now im doing a clone of it as im writing this message.

If that is the case then well done. I would now suggest you go out and buy a lottery ticket. May the luck go with you.

[rickest]

thanks for the kind words, they warmed my heart for today

In fact, some of it helped you a lot coz you apparently soldered the chip on the new board and got it working. Why did you not use DT at the end?
It's a bit of luck as well coz you could have smashed it with the contamination as well.

pepe

Yeah no problem and that is probably more accurate I maybe would not have done the soldering part if not mentioned above.

Not really sure what you mean by "DT" so if you could explain that one to me, thanks!

Anyway, this drive had the "clicking of death" and at first I thought it was the heads or arms scraping against the disc but I did open it up and saw no damage at all.

And then you put the cover back on and later there were no issues?

I swapped the bios chip with a heatgun and put a rectangle strip of duct tape on it to hold it in place and applied some weight on it to press it down and then poked each connector with a soldering iron and its working now im doing a clone of it as im writing this message.

If that is the case then well done. I would now suggest you go out and buy a lottery ticket. May the luck go with you.

There was no issues with the backup after opening the cover and having a look at the platters, it ran completely fine with no issues during the clone.

Really happy it worked out well, I will for sure get that lottery ticket on my trip to the supermarket! Wish you the best of luck aswell!

[pepe]

DT = Duct Tape