My power supply in my desktop shorted out and took both of my drives out with it. Neither will spin up at all. The data on the drives are very important, pictures home movies for the past 4 years stuff like that.

I'm pretty sure that both PCB motor control chips got burnt when it happened. So the drives themeselves are probably fine.

So on the search for drives on ebay.

My drives are WD1600JB-00GVA0 and WD800JB-00JJA0.

I just received a matching WD800JB that I won and swapped out the PCB board. The drive will now spin up but is being recognized by the bios as a WDC ROM MODEL SABRE. Which i don't believe is correct. Anyway Linux nor windows recognize the drive and neither does fdisk.

I am afraid to bid on a WD1600 now that I fear this isn't going to work. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I could do?

Thanks in advance

Since the drive was not spinning up at all, and now after swapping PCB it is spinning up defenitly indicates that is was a problem with the controller.
But, now it would have been nice if the whole recovery process would have been that easy
What did you match up, when searching for a PCB to use from ebay?
The Hardware is fine, but you have a problem with the Firmware.
This could be two things.

1) In addition to the PCB, your Firmware on the drive itself also got currupted and needs to be fixed (less common).

2) You did not make sure that the Firmware revision of the PCB's match.
(common mistake).

Where is the firmware revision found?


I matched up the full MDL # and the PCB board #

It's on the PCB board.
For your model, I think it's on the right hand side, if you turn the Hard drive on it's back, so that you are looking at the PCB.

You mean the number 2060-001292-00 REV A?

I made sure that number matched.

yes, that's the one.
Ok, then It's probably number 1)
SABRE, is factory alias for the drive, usually you see this when you have a firmware problem on the drive itself. But without the proper tools you will not be able to fix this firmware issue.

So that means the firmware chip in place U12 needs to be swaped from my original drive? I've read somewhere that that would probably work.

That's Possible, but from what you are saying, you have a perfect PCB match. I would test the Firmware first using wd_check. You can find the tool here. Then post the results. Also, swapping any chip on your PCB is not theat easy.

http://files.hddguru.com/index.php?&dir ... rectory=WD

There are multiple files is it check_wd.rar or wd.exe ?

Thanks for your help.

check_wd.rar