I have a WD5000AAKS which appears to work normally except when trying to access a certain area of the disk (always the same one) it starts returning errors and does so until it is reset.

From the information found on the internet it appears the symptoms are indicative of a common fault with the failing PCB on the Tornado series. Is this correct?

I have cleaned the heavily oxidized contacts and checked the protection diodes and corresponding resistors which all seem to be OK. If the fault indeed lies in the PCB it appears replacing the entire PCB is the next action to be taken.

However, this PCB version (PWB 2060-701477-001) of course doesn't have the discrete EEPROM chip (U12). So, my question is, should swapping the MCU (which contains the adaptive data) to the replacement PCB work or is the MCU that is the culprit?

I don't think this is a pcb issue, most likely bad sectors, maybe also weak head.
You should try to clone data with DE or some other hardware professional tools, or send the drive to a pro.

On the web you can find some software which can clone drives (as DMDE, Mediatools, ecc), but are not great as hardware cloning tools to handle drives with a lot of bad sectors and you can make things worse.

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My firmware database:
https://mega.nz/folder/O01DkBRI

Is it the first ~30% of the drive?

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PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

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