I got this Western Digital drive from a friend who put his only copy of some data on it. He wants me to try and recover them but the drive does not spin up. I am guessing it might be the controller board. I've found one on Ebay with the exact same PCB part/revision but the white sticker on the IDE connector does not match exactly. The one being sold on Ebay is sticker 2061-701314-AOO AL while mine is 2061-701314-AOO AG. Does anyone know if this will still work with my drive if that is indeed the problem? Is there anything I should try first? I have rotated the drive while listening too it and I hear a slight whine just like a working drive. I believe this means the platters are moving freely inside and its probably not a head crash issue which gives me some hope. Is there some way to be sure the spindle motor is good?


I have read that the U12 Rom chip has to be moved. Is this also true?

What do you or friend think happened with the drive?

Was it an external drive originally?

E.g. dropped? Used the wrong power adapter? Etc.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

From the conversation, he did hear some clicking some time before the failure but did not describe it to me exactly ( I can try to get more info on the clicking pattern/sound but he is not a computer person and obviously ignored it until the drive died, so i doubt he will have much detail). He said there would have been no physical drops or impacts that he knows about and the PC seems to be OK otherwise, so he does not suspect any electrical problems. In short, it was inside his PC with no changes until it didn't spin up and no longer functioned.

What exactly do you mean by this?

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

Well, I apply centrifugal force to the drive to make the platters spin inside the case slightly and listen to the drive. "Back in the day" this was the way to free stiction in drives (with much more force, though) and/or hear where if a head had a serious crash. I just wanted to be sure the platters moved inside and there wasnt any other noises going on in there.

OK, it sounded like you may have rotated the platters by hand.

Anyway, you do need to transfer U12. I suspect that the boards are a match, but that's something for others to confirm.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.