Hi, I have a faulty WD drive (the head inside just clicks) I am planning to get another drive with a donor board to try to repair it. I have read on the forum that I will need to swap over the U12 chip (is that the same as a BIOS chip?)

Does anyone have a picture showing the location of the chip? Will I 100% have to swap it to get it working? and would it cause any damage if I tried it first with just the donor board without swapping the chip?

Any advice you can give me before I attempt it?

Thanks in advance!

Even though these drives manipulate a Marvel chip which mimics bad heads, I think it is very unlikely that swapping the PCB will solve your problem.

You can try, tho', but there are risks involved. If you power up the drive and heads are damaged, you risk creating even more damage which can render your drive unrecoverable.

To answer your questions, you need to swap the U12 chip (yes NEED TO).

And now the important questions:

How much do you value your data? If your answer is "A LOT" (or more than that), then the best advice is to get your drive to a good DR lab to get it evaluated properly.
How good are you with soldering? If your answer is "NOT GOOD" (or anything similar), then the best advice is to NOT attempt the board swap, because you can end up with quite a mess.

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PS. Swapping heads for these drives is quite a challenge even for the most of the pro's.

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Northwind is right . . . Sometimes it takes multiple head sets and special, expensive gear to do a full recovery on these models. Plus lots of knowledge and experience.

The chances of you doing a successful head swap on this are negligible -- the odds are far against it.

Hopefully, yours is just a PCB problem. Good luck!

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