Hello,

I send this message to say THANK YOU to all users on this forum.
I only obtain success with NVRAM change.

This moment my HDD works fine. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!!

Best Regards, Rui Coutinho

Question for you ruicoutinho. Did you swap the NVRAM to the new, more compatible PCB or the original donor PCB discussed in your first post? Just curious. Thanks.

Hello Deave,

I bought a new PCB with closer serial, date, and with the same chips number on both PCB.
After this only swap the NVRAM from the damaged PCB to the new PCB.

And now works very good!

Best Regards, Rui Coutinho

I had a similar failure - in my case the IC at 3a is the one that has failed - this is the motor controller TLS2501 - a comparison against a 'good' drive from eBay showed no pulse trains coming out of that chip.

(Not surprising, as the drive came from a mac which was powered on while soaking wet. Fuse etc. were fine but the motor drive was burned out.)

Unfortunately as 3a is a BGA I cannot just swap the motor controller from the good board to the bad (I don't have access to a BGA rework oven).

The replacement drive I have is about 1 year newer (Dec 08) and has the masked ROM in the CPU IC 2b, whereas the original failed drive has the separate 5a ROM chip.

i.e. the reverse of the problem described here

BUT this is why I am posting - the same firmware version is marked on both drives. i.e. "Apple firmware A07" - so even though one drive has masked ROM and the other has discrete ROM, they are the same so the NVRAM should be compatible.

I moved the serial NVRAM/EEPROM from the failed board 4a to the replacement 4b, and it worked fine. i.e. the drive spins up and the data can be accessed.

Just thought that might be useful for others following this thread - i.e. if you can't find a 100% identical drive, check the firmware versions - you might get lucky!

Hi, coutinho, where did you buy your pcb? and where did you get pc-3000

Hey guys,

I just wanted to let you know that I SUCCEEDED in recovering data from a defective Hitachi 5K160 (HTS541612J9SA00). The drive did not spin up and with several tests I found out that the PCB was the reason for this fault (and not the engine). So I bought a HDD with exactly the same P/N and although some of the ICs on the PCB were different (manufacturer, number..) the formerly defective drive worked perfectly with the "new" PCB after moving the NVRAM IC!

THANKS for your help!!

Best regards
Markus