Guess I was hoping for someone to give a little advice, such as "I've tried this in the past, but in my experience the best route for your to take first is..."

From what I've read on the forum then the approach I will take is:

Move the platter to the new donor drive and move the original U12 to the donor PCB

I'll let you know how it turns out...

Just to follow up.

The method I mentioned above didn't work.

I moved the U12 to the new PCB and moved the platter. The drive spun up with no clicking, but the BIOS doesn't recognize it.

I do find it strange that the BIOS doesn't see it, but I'm done messing around with this. If someone wants to post other ideas so anyone else who reads this post in the future can learn than I think that is great, but for me I'm checking out. Thanks for all the suggestions, this is a great board!