Replacing PCB Failure

Good evening folks, i’m just wondering if anyone can help me out here.

Some months ago I tried to unscrew a faulty PCB of one of my WD 4TB External HD’s. I lost the thread on one of the screws and I therefore had to use a drill to carefully drill through the screw to detach the PCB. I tried to swap the faulty PCB with 4 others from my other 4 external hard drives to access the hard drive but the drive was failing to appear on my laptop and the hard drive clicked a few times.

A few weeks ago I ordered a donor PCB which arrived today and I went about trying to access my drive by directly installing the donor board to my hard drive which already had a BIOS chip on the PCB just to see if it would magically work. I hooked the hard drive up to my laptop to see if my laptop would recognise the drive, I got a couple of clicks from the hard drive and the laptop wasn’t recognising it. I tried different USB ports and still the same result. I did however spot the drive being recognised in device manager but was mentioning something along the lines of utilizing?

I then went about taking the BIOS chip of the brand new donor board with a solder iron in order to install the BIOS chip from the original faulty PCB, I then soldered the original BIOS chip to the donor board. Upon connecting the hard drive to my laptop, there didn’t appear to be any power going to the hard drive and all I was getting was a quick flash of the light on my hard drive.

I’m wondering, have I possibly damaged the donor board from the heat generating off the solder iron? Please see the attached photos.



Hi,

Please contact the WD Technical Support team for possible assistance:
https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask