So, I have had offers for the new PCB. I have been calling around to see who I could get to move he chips on the boards. No one is willing to do it and I had one guy say that if one chip is fried on the board so are the rest of them.

Would a platter transplant work or even be possible?

Why would this be the solution to your dead PCB?

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

While I am able to get the boards now, I have been unable to find someone who can move the chips over. I do not have enough experience with soldering to even attempt it.

But PCB and platters need to match (the whole reason you are having problems), so moving the platters would accomplish nothing

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You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

This was my ignorance. Thank you for clarifying.

I guess I will just keep trying to find someone to move the chips for me.

This seems to be a conversation had with customers from time to time in DR:
Me: "It's going to cost XYZ"
Customer: "Why so much?"
Me: "Well, we need to be able to cover labor AND parts"
Customer: "Can't you just swap the platters to another drive?"

Obvious response is "well, if we did that, we'd still need a parts drive to swap to" O.o

For some reason - not sure where it's coming from - but I think customers see this on crime shows on TV or something and think it's cake to do.

@Chrisk,

What I did notice in your pictures is that 1 and 2 are the same, but if you look closely at board 3 you'll notice that there is no external ROM (U12), meaning that the ROM for that drive is internal. This swap (albeit, not impossible) is not something the average Joe can do, as it requires much more than a soldering gun to do (you'd have to swap the MCU (big chip with "M" on it).

Preamp issues or not, this is looking to be more and more of a DR (not DIY) job. My suggestion would be to send it to someone to have them perform a diagnosis on it before you start getting PCBs and swapping ROMs. At least if the diagnosis is thorough and they tell you it's board work, it will either be A.) fairly cheap, or B.) you may want to do it yourself. But on the 3rd board/drive, I would let a DR place or PCB reseller do that one for you.

Regards,

Dizi

Can you report what are the exact reasons given why they don't do it and what kind of lab / shop you asked ?

Then, if one chip is fried the rest of the board can or cannot be affected - proper diagnose is needed and each case is one by itself.
Finally, a platter transplant is useless.

I have been calling my local TV repair shops. Most say they wont even attempt to do what I am asking and the one person who actually said he has done it before said that if one chip is fried the rest are dead also. None of these people have even seen the boards yet. This was just over the phone. The one persons response about the entire board being fried could possibly be true, I am interpreting it as he didn't want to take on the job.

I live in a small city, so the responses I am getting are not surprising.

I'd be surprised if there isn't anything else fried on that board.
Interesting triple reaction though, all 3 fried. I think the U12 needs to go to your donor.

I get many hard to find donors from donordrives.com.

One thing you can do is to measure the resistances between the +5V, -5V , and ground pins (pins 2,4,6) at the preamp connector on the HDA, using the 200 ohms range on your multimeter. However, this will only tell you if there is an excessive load on either supply. AIUI, the "risk" that is being referred to is the extremely unlikely scenario where the preamp writes all over the embedded servo information.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Even in bigger cities is not surprising, as it can give a lot of troubles and it's for them an ungrateful job so no wonder they drop the case. Less than less if it is BGA. It is different if you find someone who do this kind of PCB repair as routine job.
The problem is how profitable are these small jobs when you run a LEGAL activity and pay taxes... so no wonder about the outcome.

Try http://www.hdd-parts.com/firmware-transfer.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

So, I think I finally have someone who can work on my boards for me.

Here is my current plan.
Purchase two 2 tb HDDs.

Assuming I can get the other HDD to boot, I will immediately clone the drives to the new HDDs.

Since the old HDD were in a WHS data pool, if I can recover 2 of the 3 drives I might still have a chance to recover most of my data (maybe).

I am going to attempt to use the cloning software DD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_%28Unix%29).

If anyone sees a flaw in my plan please let me know, or if you just have a better method please let me know.

Thanks again!

A couple of comments (but I'm not giving an opinion on you doing DIY in the first place):

- I don't know whether you're new to dd, but I'd suggest you do some practice first if you are. Remember that incorrect use of dd (e.g. reversing the if & of parameters) can overwrite your source disk - which would be Bad News™.

- Even if you don't expect to get any read errors (with a "working" PCB on your source drive), I would still use GNU ddrescue in preference to plain dd, due to its log and increased control over retries.

They are actually one of the first places I went to. They do not have the boards I need