The quest for experience points continues.

I had a failing 1TB-drive (right one in the image) with nothing important on it, but I decided to train my skills on it. Opened it in a clean box and found that the heads were damaged. Found a HDD-donor and bought it, only to find upon arrival that everything except the FW-version matches (20003 instead of 20002). I still gave it a try to transplant the head assembly at what I think was a success.

Giving the drive power, nothing happened. Tried using the donor-PCB and noticed the drive spins-up, so the heads were probably assembled okay. It was not readable, ofcourse, since I hadn't done a ROM-transfer. I don't know a lot about heads, but not spinning up with the transplanted head makes me believe it has some sort of id-code that's programmed into the firmware, and now that the firmware is non-matched the drive won't accept the new head.

Anyhow, is there any chance of making the drive work given the conditions above? Is my assumption about the head-id correct, or plain bogus?

Samsung drives attempt to identify the preamp during their POST.

Try to obtain a serial terminal log from the drive. This should tell you what is happening.

How to connect a terminal cable on a Samsung drive:
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 189&p=2786

Samsung Terminal Commands:
http://www.alexsoft.org/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=682&p=3693
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=27355

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

The FW is not important for Head swap, rightly said by "fzabkr" connect drive through terminal to find out whats wrong.
IMO, the donor drive is not compatible for head swap because the PN is different also there is 10 month difference of manufacturing date.

good luck.

_________________
Data Recovery Pakistan