Board Level Compatibility WD5000L series

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Tropical greetings to all! I have a WD5000LPCX which bit the dust due, probably, to heat exhaustion! As the logic board isn’t recognised by any laptop, I’m assuming it’s defunct. I have the chance of buying a WD5000LPVX logic board on eBay, so my question is, will my existing HDA assembly from the ‘PCX’ be compatible with this updated ‘PVX’ revision logic board?

Thanks and Regards,

Mango Biche

2

Hello,

I dont recommend attempting any repairs on a hard drive since this may damage the drive even more and make the data irrecoverable.

3

Hi Hamlet,

Thanks for the advice! While you may have a point, I’ve been around HD’s since the days when when a 300mb disk-pack was 15 inches in diameter and blue, so there’s not much that ‘phases’ me with respect to HD’s! I also spent some working with Control Data in the pre Seagate era back when SCSI was still a lad!

What I’m trying to do here is to rescue the information on the disk to save myself the hassle of reinstalling Win 10 from zero. As the HDA doesn’t ‘rattle’ when shaken I think the heads are probably ‘parked’ and the fact that BIOS simply can’t ‘see’ the disk points to a logic board issue, which is why I thought that it’d be easier to simply change the board. Usually, unless there’s been a major redesign of the HDA assembly most of the ‘incremental’ changes in versions are down to ‘Firmware’ upgrades, so that’s why I wanted someone from WD just to check that out for me.

As you correctly pointed out, being cautious is good practice, however let me share a comment with you from one of our trainers at CDC “If you broke it and now you can’t fix it; you probably learned something valuable.” I broke lots of things in my career!

Thanks & Regards,

Mango Biche

4

Morning All,

I think I have a solution to the problem! I came across someone on eBay with a WD5000LPCX with bad sectors, so I’ve bought the disk and will change the logic board over to my currently somnolent drive, and hopefully all will be back to normal.

Once again, thanks to Hamlet for your advice! I’ll add that, if your data’s important it’s worth backing-up!

Great Day to all,

Regards,

Mango Biche