Hi, I've got some questions about a WD passport essentials hard drive.

The computer would not read it when I plugged it into the computer e.i. No USB noise when I plugged it in or seen in disk management. After plugging it into the USB port, it would attempt to spin up 5 times and give up.

I bought a new PCB for it. The computer would recognize the new PCB without the hard drive attached. I swapped the bios chips, and then the new PCB acted the same as the old one. Took the bios chips off and computer recognized a USB device on the old and new PCP.

Thus, it appears as if the bios chips are bad. Is there any way I can bring these chips back to life?

Any discussion on what they do would be appreciated too.

Nothing to do with the "BIOS" chips.

Several quiet "clicks" and spin down = bad heads or worse

No DIY

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Hello Pounce and welcome! (I see it's your first post here)

First of all, I'm not a pro, or someone with big experience SO I could TRY to help you on reasoning or searching information, but I'll never advice you to do anything because data recovery It's a very delicated deal! With one bad move you could turn something really easy to fix in a nightmare!

Probably pcimage it's right, clicking and spinning down isn't a good sign and may be you have an head problem or worse. It's impossible to say for sure with the information that you're providing, an this lets think that you didn't read so much about DR...
If you have important data inside your drive the advice is allways "send it to a pro", but if you are here (like me) just to study without any real need of get your data back you should read around to understand how to make a better diagnose and tell us what are you able to do!

I see that you swapped the BIOS chips so I think that at list you are able to solder SMD components
Read around and post more information, may be someone will be more motivated to help you !

Best Regards
Paolo

Reading what he wrote I'm not sure that he ever tried with the new board before have the bios chips swapped!

Thanks for the quick replies. .

So, I'm doing this for my knowledge more than trying to recover the data.

I did not hear any clicks. If you youtube search "beep beep beep of death" you can hear the sound. I've got the same problem as him.

I open the hard drive up and it looks very good. I need to read up on the pre-amp issue.

I did try the doner PCB with the swapped bioses and had the same problem as the original PCB. I removed the 2 bios off the board, and the computer then recognized the USB HDD. Of course I could not read any thing off the HDD without the bios chips.

OK, just read up on the pre-amp problem. I changed out the PCB with a donor, so unless the donor microchip was bad too, it should have worked. Also, it looks like if the pre-amp goes bad on WD drive, it will make two clicks and the spindle will slow down. Mine did something 5 times.

I'm confused on why the bios chips would prevent the computer from seeing the USB drive is plugged in.

The heads are dead... Put the PCB back together and learn about head swaps if you are interested in going down that path and the data is not important.

I think heads Problems too.

Head exchange is not easy to do, but if data not important you can try it.

Lucky

Thanks for the information. I'm looking into doing a head change and have been looking around the guts of the drive. Would I be able to see damage to the heads? The head was parked in the middle of the drive when I opened it up. I turned the drive and the head moved to the outside parking area. I don't see any damage. I've attached an image and was wondering if someone sees the damage or can tell me where to look? I would like to know the heads are damaged before trying to replace them.

Heads 0 and 2 physically look fine (which does not necessarily means they are functional). 1 and 3 can't see because of angle.

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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

If you really need answers you should start with the exact model of your drive.

Most of the recent WD drives simply don't have ROM chips, so what did you swap?

Please don't say that you opened the drive OUTSIDE A CLEAN ROOM. it looks like you opened it up on your kitchen table, that means your drive is buggered completely.

+1


Also, the fact that the heads look ok (actually you're looking at the sliders, not the heads) doesn't mean they are ok. They need to be inspected under microscope and again you can't be sure.

I'm sorry, this is not the news you want to hear, but this is out of your league in my humble opinion. If you value your data, find someone who knows what they 're doing.

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Thanks for the posts. Yaa, I did open it up on the kitchen table, and yes I know that is very bad for the hard drive.

I'm using this hard drive as a learning tool. I still would like to swap the heads, and I have concerns on wether the new heads would last on the contaminated platters long enough for me to see if I was successful. Any comments?

Also, the p/n is wdbacy5000abk-00. Are heads compatible between 250gb and 500gb? I have the 500gb, and the 250 hard drive are chraper. Also, I've found some cheaper wdbacy5000abk-nesn hard drives. Does the -nesn have anything to do with the heads? From reading the blogs, it looks like it just has to do with software. Is this true?

More often the answer is NO rather than YES

Also even heads from the similar model might still be incompatible because of other issues your are not yet aware of.

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