Hi everyone,

I've been reading this board (and a few others) trying to find information on what I might be able to do with this WD1600AAJB that has a burned PCB. The majority of posts that show the PCB's are SATA (the one I'm working on is IDE) and look slightly different, so I'm not quite sure if my problem applies.

Long story short is it doesn't spin up at all - basically a chip blew up, but it doesn't seem to be the 12v tvs that most are referring to around here. If someone could let me know what it is, I'll post some images below.

Also, I've read that if swapping the PCB on a WD one would need to move the BIOS chip as well, however I've yet to come across any specific instructions for that. Presuming that's my only hope at this point - is it difficult? I'm capable with a soldering iron, but I wouldn't call myself advanced.

Thanks in advance for all of your help. Any insight would be appreciated.

Doesn't appear to be an external ROM chip on the board so it's embedded in the cpu (the chip with the big M). Swapping the boards will serve no purpose because the ROM contents have to be transferred to the new board. There are a couple of ways of doing this - apart from removing and re-soldering the cpu chip onto an identical board- neither being able to be performed without professional aid. However, if the data is important it should be do-able at fairly modest cost.

What's "fairly modest" mean? Do you have a ballpark?

Right now I'm looking at buying one of these PCB's for 40 bucks and transferring the cpu chip myself. Of course if I could just replace the chip that blew at U4 on the original PCB from the one I purchased and not have to touch the cpu chip, that would be ideal.

Does anyone know what was at U4? It seems to be beyond where the drive would pick up power off the board, so I'm confused as to why its not even spinning.

That's capacitors I think, but most certainly now other parts of the PCB are damaged also.

It's not easy to transfer the CPU into another PCB. Are you really sure you have experience with it?

It's not so much I think I have experience, I just like to fully understand what happened and exhaust all possibilities before I shell out big bucks. I'm not against going to a pro; I just have some ideas and was hoping for some guidance and insight, which I've been getting and appreciate.

Also - if it was just a capacitor, couldn't that be replaced easier than transferring the cpu chip onto a new pcb board? I definitely have experience swapping capacitors of various sizes.

You can swap the capacitors if that's the case and try it.
That's a thing you can do yourself.

Swapping the CPU it's not easy even for experienced people, so if you're not experienced I think you don't have a chance.

Try the capacitor and let us know the results.

@Osiris10:


I work in electronics, not DR, but something labeled U4 would not be a capacitor. The U prefix refers to an IC. You can see an example of this at U9 on that board.

And before you ask no, I don't know what U4 is on those boards - and even if the U4 component type is identified, it doesn't mean that replacing U4 will make the board work correctly again.

Personally, I think that using a DR company is your most realistic path to success here.

That's exactly the sort of info I was hoping to hear. It didn't seem like a capacitor, someone else had suggested it and I thought I'd pursue that end.

Thanks again!