I definitely fried the power board from my drive...don't ask. A few components are crispy right around the 5V input.

I did some research and ended up buying a replacement board of the same revision to swap it out. I tried it before messing with the U12 chip just in case I would get lucky. It spooled up but would not read so I put my original chip on the new board and tried again. This time it would read the drive but showed it as a 32GB unformatted disk. At this point I went back to the bench and attempted to remove the chip and reseat it just in case

Bad idea. I broke a pin off my ROM chip. Not just broke off it looks like it pulled the entire pin out of the case. There is definitely no little bit there to solder a jumper onto either.

Do I have any other options?

Will a board(or just the chip) from an identical drive work?

Is the ROM programmed specifically to the drive it is in or generally to the drive size and configuration it is in?

Can I still salvage?

Possible, but not DIY. Only pro.

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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

Agree.

"you" can't salvage but a pro almost certainly can.

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AIUI, the fact that the drive spun up confirms that the ROM transfer was OK. Which pin did you damage?

BTW, which jumpers did you install? WD drives have an "alternate" jumper setting to circumvent certain BIOS capacity limitations.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I damaged pin 5.....pretty sure. Jumper was set to slave. I don't have it in a machine, I have it hooked up to an external usb based reader. I have not tried it with the damaged chip yet

Bad news. Pin #5 is a data pin.

In any case, the problem appears to be an internal one, so you would have come to a dead end after the board swap. I'm not a data recovery professional, but I suspect that your drive has a firmware problem.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I managed to shave enough of an edge off the chip to expose the broken piece of the leg. Now I am unsure which direction it is supposed to mount. I have it mounted now with the indicator notch(or what I believe to be the notch) facing the far end where the cables plug in...and that is also the damaged pin...I guess it would be pin 1. I can't make out anything written on the chip either...I just can't seem to hold the light right.

Either way it is installed and the drive will not even spin up...maybe tomorrow I will spin the chip around and try again. I've pretty much given up hope of salvaging my data but I will beat this dead horse for a while as long as it only costs me time

If you have installed the chip backwards, it will now most probably be dead.

The notch on the chip identifies pin #1. There should be a corresponding mark on the PCB.

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

The problem is I can't really make out if there is a notch or even a mark in the chip denoting pin 1...even before I damaged it. I'll take a closer look tomorrow