I've got defunct drive here. It powers on, clicks for about 3 seconds then goes into Safe Mode. I've paid premium prices to find a matching donor drive; however, the PCB's don't seem to match. I can do a hot swap and access the firmware with PC3000, but I believe that I'll need the original PCB with the correct head mapping info before I can do a smart hot swap and access the data on the drive.

Here are the drive specs.

Bad drive:
Model - WD5000AAJS-22YFA0
DATE - 29 SEP 2007
DCM - DARCNT2CBB
PCB - 2061-701477-100 AC

Donor drive:
Model - WD5000AAJS-22YFA0
DATE - 12 MAR 2008
DCM - HBRNHT2MAB
PCB - 2061-701444-600 AF

I've got a couple of WD5000AAKS drives that have PCB's that match the bad drive, but they aren't even from the same series of drive.

So, my questions are:
1. Did Western Digital change up on the PCB for this drive model?
2. Did the someone switch out the PCB and not put the correct one on before sending it my way?
3. Is there a way to do this without having the original PCB?
4. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to gain access to the user data on this drive?

Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Did you mistyped a board numbers on your original drive?

Why do you assume that you have a board problem?

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www.datarecoveryne.com

Not likely with these symptoms to be a board problem. However if it is then PC3000 UDMA will allow you to rebuild ROM contents from SA to use on similar PCB. Unfortunately, this drive belongs to the ROYL family which are not successful candidates for smart hot swap. You would have to be lucky enough to stumble upon a donor with very close adaptive data for it to work.

Nope, that is the correct number for the original board. Though, I'm thinking that it isn't truly the original board.



I'm not 100% sure it is a board problem. However, without being sure that I even have the correct PCB with the correct ROM, it does make it tough to diagnose.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Can anyone confirm whether my defunct drive has an original PCB?

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

If you have PC3000 UDMA and you say you can read SA, why worry about whether you have original PCB or not? Just rebuild ROM from SA and copy to another PCB.

In order to reprogram a PCB, I need to know which PCB to reprogram. Do I match to the defective drive PCB using the AAKS donor or should I use the matching AAJS donor PCB?

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

Well, the good old saying, "Never give up!" always works for me. I got the drive to detect this morning with the original PCB. So, that answers my question, which really makes me wonder how we'll be able to confirm a donor PCB if the codes on the PCB's don't need to match.

So, right now, I've saved out all the HDD resources without any troubles and tested the heads...only one head shows a read error, which I can work with. At least I can now access the user data on the drive.

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Luke
Recovery Force Data Recovery

The following statement is completely wrong if there is a ROM chip on the board, but most use embedded 192 kb ROM instead of the standard 128 kb

So with embedded ROM as in AAKS you can not reprogram then yet. If you attempt to overwrite it has the effect of completely wiping it and resulting with another dead board that wont even respond in Safe mode. The problem is that research into this problem is very expensive as each test can result with yet another dead drive. So we need to see if there is another way of reading and writing ROM than through ATA commands.

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If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/

Man, I'd hate to be financing that research!

That's right, and then once its done, someone will put a post here saying how to do it, claim all the credit whilst my research money will never recoup itself.. It makes you understand why some want to keep things close to their chests.

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If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you probably don't fully understand the situation. ... Mr Kipling

https://www.mjm.co.uk/

...or into their lab.

...or in their heads

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My Forum

hdd heard i think so ,and you donor dirve is unusable!