Advice on diagnosing failed WD300

WD Internal Drives Internal Drives
1

I have a failed WD300 Caviar (vintage 2001) internal drive I’m trying to diagnose. There’s no sound of the drive spinning up when powered, and it is not detected by the bios. I’ve verified the particular ATA bus and power connection function properly by connecting a working drive to them.

The PCB part number is 2060-001003-001. I’ve removed the board from the drive and see no obvious signs of thermal/overvoltage damage.

Back side:

IMG_20231231_211308016_36_pct
IMG_20231231_211308016_36_pct1451×1088 168 KB

Front side:

IMG_20231231_211246502_36_pct_annotated_compressed
IMG_20231231_211246502_36_pct_annotated_compressed1451×1088 266 KB

The red lines highlight diode locations. D1 is empty. D5 and D6 are three-lead devices. D2, D3, and D4 test as overrange on a 0-400 ohm scale, so I don’t believe any of them are blown.

My question for now is whether this problem seems likely to be due to a PCB fault and, if so, if there are other components on the PCB I should check. The layout of this board is a bit different from others I’ve found in the forum and I’m not sure where I should be looking for zero-ohm resistors or fuses.

I tried to post a third image of the drive label but was disallowed as a new user. The drive model is WD300AB-00BVA0, DCM is DSBHBQ2AH with a 6 March 2001 date of manufacture.

Thanks for any suggestions,

Norm

2

Hi @normbw ,

Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting:

3

Hi @Keerti_01,

Thanks, no, I hadn’t considered that since the drive was manufactured a bit more than 20 years ago. I see that you are WD staff, though, so if that’s encouraged, I’ll give it a try.

The board has a Western Digital-branded main controller, so I take it this is a “pre-Marvell” board. I do not see a chip that looks like an 8-lead ROM on the board. I’m wondering if this means the “adaptive” parameters are stored in the main controller (?).

5

hard disks do not last forever