Hi,
In a Darwin type moment generated by my PC's power supply (as in it is def extinct now!) I have burned out 3 Western Digital 320GB drives, all WD3200JB's. On 2 of the 3 the servo chip seems to have gone + a few others burnt, firmware chip looks fine. On the other I can't see any issue at all. I have another WD3200JB drive, any advice on my options in getting any of my data back? If I lose it well that is life but from what I have read here could I essentially read the configuration of each u12 firmware chip and write it back onto the good board + swap in the appropriate disk, or is there something else easier/harder?

Kind regards
H

Hello,

U have to match the middle letters of the family number to use the pcb from the donor drive: your burnt drive's model number should look like WD3200JB-xxyyzz, where yy is neccessary to match with the donor drive. Another guideline is to match the number of the PCB, this was mentioned in some topic recently.
If this is satisfied, the easiest way to get a compatible PCB is to unsolder U12 from the bad one and solder it onto the good one. U probably cannot read it out while on the defective PCB because of 2 reasons:
- it is pretty burnt and doesn't work,
- U would need some really expensive tool to read the ROM from the PCB, it is less expensive if U unsolder and read with a programmer device, but once it is desoldered, it is practically not useful to read and program another...

good luck

pepe

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Adatmentés - Data recovery

Hello Pepe

Thanks for the reply - much appreciated. Luckily (strange to put that considering what has happened!) all 3 of my damaged drives + the good ones are all KF. I'm less than handy with a soldering iron, but at least this gives me some hope! Many thanks again.

Cheers
Drew

P.S. I did read on some data repair site that WD drives were more suseptible than most to this kind of damage. Is this true or a load of b%$£$^&$£...?