I have the following drive MDL = WD5000AAKB-00UKAB. Actually it belongs to a friend. It was in his 500gb mybook. The hdd seems to be ok mechanically. It spins up and clicks when being accessed. He can't afford professional data recovery so I've advised him to look for a replacement PCB and try that. Unfortunately when I do a google search on the complete MDL#, only a few places have one listed with that firmware number and none have it in stock.

I'm hoping that someone here knows of vendors that specialize in this sort of thing that for whatever reason can't be found easily with a google search.

Any help would be appreciated.

There was another post on this forum about removing the TVS chips in order to bypass that safety mechanism. Does anyone know which chips would need to be removed on this particular drive and even if that would be a good idea.

Thanks again.

Your problem is quite surely not the pcb, and this is another thread about WD5000 heads, people who doesn't surrender to the idea that it can't be repaired at home etc. Pass...

OK, I searched around the forum for info on the WD5000 series drives. From what I saw I've come to the following conclusions:

Oh, btw - thanks to Steve for this post - it helped a lot.

1. head alignment is random
2. position of servo tracks is unique to each drive and recorded in PCB bios
3. replacing the PCB with one having same firmware will be useless since it will not know the location of the servo tracks and therefore cannot read the data.

Is this more or less correct?

If so, then the only option would be professional data recovery - correct?

Thanks again.

1:true
2:true and not true, Bios contains SOME info that is unique to
individual drive.But Not servo-tracks location.
3 Not true.. Rom chip can be placed on new pcb.


The problem is that you most likely have head damage, so YES you really need to seek professional recovery company.

OK, I guess that's what blackst was talking about.

I've never heard of heads going bad. head crashes yeah, but the actual heads? Weird. But you all are obviously the experts so it's not like I'm questioning that.

I guess I was just lucky with my IBM deskstars. Out of 8 drives, 6 had bad pcbs - which died after the warranty. But since I bought a couple batches of 4, I was able to swap out the pcbs and get my data back before the second pcb also died.

Well, thanks again for giving us the benefit of your expertise.

If you have read a lot of the posts on this forum,
you will notice that at the moment there alot of
these drives failing.. Most all of them were also from
Mybook drives. This should be a clue in itself.
Mybook's were selling for from $100 to $125 in walmart
when they were in the 80 gb range. Now you can get
a 500 gb drive for the same $100 to $125 range in walmart.
these drives have 6.25 times the storage for the same price.
This means the same quality control and manufacturing costs
have gone into a bigger drive. maintaining low cost quality has
to suffer at some point.
Also as noted, most all are from Mybooks. These enclosures
have no cooling, and drives are almost always stored vertical.
now whether vertical storage is a problem is debatable, but
none-the-less is a factor to be considered.

Mybooks work smoothly if treated like eggs. Period. I have seen 500 gb. Wd drives on usb box working for 2 years flawlessly... because the users simply couldn't move them! So take your own conclusions.