Hey all
Just discovered this forum, tried my best to find my answer in it, but searching the terms brings all sorts of results, and i went through 3-4 pages of the proper category but i can't go to 450,
so if the answers to my questions exist somewhere, feel free to direct me to the right place!
My problem is a bit of a long story, i am an over all do-it-yourself person on as many fields as i can and one thing i've learned is to ask first before you get into actions you might regret.
Unfortunately, i hadn't come across this forum yet, so i did get a bit deep into this already, but anyway, here goes:
WD Gold starts ticking for me to realize it's the only drive not backed up out of 18 TB of storage (filled up).
This arrived right after emptying older hard drives and putting all the data in their right place and then a forest fire arrived and burned all the old hard drives away.
No recovery possible there, but then the ticking comes at data that had survived!
This is not important data, hence they were a perfect opportunity for me to try to extract them and experiment and if they go away, so be it!
It's a bit of ego, not necessity, to win the problem by getting the data out and then throw the drive away.
(away = store it with all the old hardware i have because i don't throw electronic waste out, i marry it for life!)
Anyway.. digressing..
to the very inexperienced with data recovery ear, this ticking sounded like a head problem and that's what youtube suggested a year ago with a minimal search.
Hard drive got stored aside, couple of months later i looked up the donor hard drive and then i studied on how to do a head change operation.
More months went by for me to build the confidence to do it and read as much as i can about it.
Some sources said it was possible if some clean room was achieved and that's what i did and it is now done but the harddrive would not allow the PC to POST so i started worrying about the board.
I had concluded it was the head because i remember hitting the drive with my chair as i had it lying on the floor at some point but anyway it turns out that this was the one drive of my 15 year experience with SATA that i had inserted (earlier) the SATA power cable backwards and broke the tab.
This led me to consider the possibility of having it being plugged backwards by accident at some point later (without realizing it) because now with the tab broken, this is possible to do and being a bit busy with dealing with fires and data transfers, maybe i did.
Swapped board with the identical donor, the hard drive is perfectly recognized by BIOS as the drive that it is but as you professionals know already, now the data/info of the previous drive need to be transferred to the new board.
Here's where the problem gets challenging... the hard drive has no BIOS (8 pin) chip i can retract data from.
So my options are a)to transfer the IC chip as it is and i have seen that working on some cases (internet/youtube) or b)diagnose the board and replace problematic parts from the donor board which is, i believe, trickier than soldering tiny contacts, because the new component might blow again if the problem is elsewhere, leaving me with two useless boards.
So, thinking of (a) :
My soldering skills are not for that level but i think i can pull it off with the right equipment but i decided to call some pro around where i live (Greece) who can remove a chip and add it to another board more confidently than i can and he started telling me that because it's for a hard drive they usually charge thousands for data recovery etc. and i explained to him that i don't bring data to him but only a chip and he didn't call back so here comes my ego again, saying i don't need him, but i need a stable base, a k-tip to my solder iron (solder station: YH-836 with air already exists) and a magnifier for those OH GOD HOW TINY THEY ARE contacts!
Are the chances of succeeding in this too minimal to try?
Is there a way to transfer the cylinder/sector data from the chip even through (logically priced) paid software instead?
Even if i manage to pull this off, will i encounter encryption problems or things like that that i read around the forum?
The harddrive is a WD Gold internal 3.5" (WD2002FYPS-01U1B0)
Not inserting a link or image of the board because of reading about some delays in posting if links exist,
but you can look it up to see the missing BIOS chip but the contacts there from its predecessor design (i guess)
They are up top under the connectors.
Board # 2060-771642-001
Thank you all in advance, even for reading all the story!
Concerning the board, i checked it's two main diodes and their voltages seem alright, so i guess it wasn't a backwards power that did this because those would have blown out first (i suspect).
In case you are suggesting road (b), you should know that my board diagnosis skills are at such a level that i decide to solder tiny contacts instead!
And... oh yeah... i did swap the head back to its original..
Realizing it was the board, it kept bugging me that a new head might have new contact points or whatever HD-weird, so i went back to the operating table before "the dust settles"
Now this harddrive's life is ticking backwards, making my quest to do this a "now or never" endeavor!
harddrive data is just a collection of anime i was gathering when i was young and there's some sentimental value today in things gathered when the internet was under 1Mb (128k in my case back then).
it's partly nostalgia, partly hobby and love for electronics and learning to do new things and partly (50%) (hard to describe this one) treating PTSD by small victories because fighting fires for 3 days and nights leaves a mark and small victories like the one i am trying to pull of make it heal!
Funny thing is that my off-residence backup was attacked by the same fire at the same day, 25km away, but at the other side of the same mountain.
You can never have too many backups man...
Shared those details about the background only so people don't think i am someone trying to make money out of their tips!
I just had a "better to ask some pros" moment before i solder my nose to a WD board trying to see all those pins,
that's all!
Thank you all !
♥