Hi HDD Spaz,

Yes I did try what you have suggested and the answer was:
Put the donor pcb with donor rom on the patient hard drive. Does it spin? NO
Put the donor pcb with patient rom on donor drive, does it spin? YES

If the head preamp was fried would that stop the drive from spinning?

The only other thing I can think of is the donor and patient U12 roms were from different manufacturers. Is this subtle difference likely to cause a problem? I personally wouln't have thought so.

in my experience shouldn't have made a difference. It would appear spindle motor is fried. Can you put donor drive with patient rom into safe mode then read rom via kernal?

Also put some paper between HDA and pcb connection then power drive. if pre amp was preventing disk from spinning this would eradicate that.

Good luck.

Thanks for the thumbs up!
I did that simple test and the patient drive spun up correctly to what seems to be the correct speed using the donor pcb. So the preamp is done for?

If the original poster tries out the same test i'm sure he will obtain the same result.

This is what I noticed while changing rom chip to the new pcb.


Old pcb- not changed: Drive would not spin due to it being burned.

New pcb- not changed: Drive spun up and bios saw something there but couldn't figure out what it was.

New PCB- with old ROM chip drive did not start... Nothing was found in bios. Bios did hang and did not find the master cdrom. And yes the hd drive was set to slave. And I did attempt to fun the drive in master alone.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Computerfreak, From your description your problem seems to be different from my own case. Maybe your rom chip needs checking?

I'm not sure how to check it... At this point in time, I'm not sure what else I can do... This is getting to the point of me wanting to call Western Digital and bitch at them for an hour and a half... I have done this thing of plugging in the drive many times. ( not WD's ) And I have never had a failure.. I relize what I did was dumb and stupid. But it kind of said when the brother of this drive dies at the same time, different reasons. I'm not very happy with Western Digital right now.

I'm assuming that there is no way to flash a rom chip with the data correct?