PR2100 Bricked completely dead

:Hi I am in Brisbane Australia. I purchased a PR2100 very cheaply on eBay. It was completely dead. It came without power supplies which I had to purchase from Amazon Australia.
I exhausted all options to get the thing going - reset - no life at all.

I dismantled it completely and located the bios chip. There was no obvious damage to the circuitry. It is a 8mb 1.8v chip. I had to read the chip details with the help of a magnifying glass. I had a small eprom programmer which I purchased from China for $25AU. I purchased it for a number of computer projects. I also have a couple of dead Dell laptop motherboards. The programmer was a CH341A Pro with the 1.8v adapter.

After some trial and error I got the programmer operating under Windows 10.

I made sure I removed the CR2032 battery from the PR2100 board. First of all I searched the WD support web site to see if there was a bios file which I could write back to the bios chip. I wasn’t able to identify any likely file (all the bin files were obviously too large). The first thing you should do prior to attempting to write to the bios eprom is to back up what is there already. I did this and read the file and saved it to my laptop.

As I am a subscriber to several forum web sites (I have found Bad Caps . Net Forum to be a very good one), it was my intention to post a message and see if anyone had the correct bin file. It was also my intention to approach WD to see if they would supply the file.

I decided to give the PR2100 one last try. I flashed the saved bios file back to the eprom and reassembled the PR2100. To my absolute joy the thing booted up and is now working perfectly.

I am posting this as it may be of some assistance to anyone who also has a completely dead PR2100. It may just be worth a try.

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I have a PR2100 that has the slow blue blinking light problem and never starts up. I left it running for several days to see if it would eventually recover, but no luck. I also tried the 4 second and 40 second reset to no end. I took the device apart, and there’s no visible damage to the circuitry. I also tested the power supply and it’s putting out a solid 12.45v.

At this point, my device is well out of warranty and the drives have been removed. So, there’s no worry that I’ll do more damage. I’d like to take a stab at repairing it before chucking it into the trash…if you don’t mind pointing me in the right direction?

Is this the correct tool to read/write the bios?

I’m sorry I haven’t read your post previously until today. As set out the recovery process I used in my post and i just consider myself damm lucky.
I already had at the time a eprom programmer which I use sometimes to repair bricked laptops. It’s a H341A and usually comes as a kit. I am i Australia and you can buy the kit on eBay for about $30AU. It should come with a couple of accessories which you will need. The H341A is a 2.5v programmer and to program the bios chip in the PR2100 and most if not all laptops you will need the 1.8v adapter. The other part you should receive in the kit is a tweezer type clamp which will fit over the pins of the eprom chip.
When ever attempting to re-program eproms it is always a very good idea to back up what is already there on the chip. That way if anything goes wrong in the programming process you can always recreate what was there in the first place.
i was lucky as all I did was to read the eprom chip, save the file to my laptop and then re-write the file back again. I didn’t want to leave the PR2100 in pieces so I re-assembled it and tested it and it worked fine. If it hadn’t I would have had to source the firmware from somewhere and then attempt to program it. Unfortunately the WD firmware update program suite is from memory about 120mb and I didn’t have the programming skill to extract the bin bios firmware.
You could attempt to do what I did you may be as lucky as I was. I am still using my PR2100 to this day and it works fine. I replaced the two power supplies with about a 5amp 12v single unit and a Y adapter with WD plugs. I also put a switch in line. I run two 6tb WD Red drives in it.
You will

I didn’t see the last part of your message. Yes that is the correct eprom programmer in your Amazon link. Just make sure you also get the 1.8v adapter. Pin 1 on the tweezer thing is the red line and pin 1 on the eprom chip had a dot indentation on the surface of the chip. There should be a number of places where you can download the eprom programming software, usually a link is provided where the programmer is sold. It is pretty basic software and runs on Win 10 OK. There will a list of chips which it can program. If yours is not one listed just choose one of the same manufacturer type which is close with similar parameters.