Hello everybody,

I have a Western Digital Caviar Green drive with faulty PCB and USB-SATA bridge. I guess a PCB swap is the best way to recover my data, but I want to know if I have any other options before doing that.

The PCB died right before it was swapped to another faulty hard drive for diagnosis (it was an exact match), so I guess I got to damage it at some point. At first I thought it was caused by overvoltage, although there was no visible damage, so I removed the D4 diode with no results.

D3 reads "1" (over limit) on the 200 Ohm range. 0 Ohm resistors (R64 and R67) both read 1'2.

Does this mean that the resistors are damaged? Should I try jumpering them?

Thank you very much in advance.

Can you explain
Was the pcb working before you swapped and became faulty after swapping for diagnosis?



Checking with a multimeter should give you an idea if it has failed




if you got value 1.2 Ohms , it should be ok , (depending upon the multimeter )
So you dont have to wirewarp/ jump them.

You can trace the +5V and +12V beyond them to be sure.
Posting a picture can help.

can you give more information like...
What was the initial status and what you were trying to do and what happened .

Exactly. It was working perfectly until I used it to test another hard drive (PCB was an exact match).




D3 reads 495Ω and 320000Ω.

I'll try to post a photo, although there's no visible damage.

Thank you very much for your help.

Using PCBs to test faulty drive is always a risky business. UNFORTUNATELY life and electronics are not limited to TVS and it's not always Sunday.

COMPLETE diagnose (a multimeter is not enough, sorry) must be carried out BEFORE swapping PCBs otherwise the risk is to kill the new PCB !

Yes, that is what I learned from this experience.

Hopefully I'll be able to recover the data from the other hard drive (the one that was initially working) with a new PCB and a ROM swap.


EDIT: A little information that might help: the PCB (the one that died in the process) got to work on the faulty hard drive (it was spinning normally and detected by the BIOS). It stopped working when putting it back on its original hard drive.

So the pcb did not fail because it was used on a faulty drive.

Some accidental error must have been made while replacing the pcb to its original drive.

If you are not confident , dont try to debug the faulty pcb now.
Try to get the data from the drive using the other pcb as you have planned.
Later , if you have the time or if you want to, you can think of finding what went wrong with your pcb.

good luck