I had a catestrophic failure of the power supply in my media PC. There was a snap and a puff of smoke and then nothing. That failure took out the motherboard, the memory, video card, and three out of the four WD hard drives. (The CPU miraculously survived but who cares if all that other stuff went.)
One failed drive was just the OS so that’s no biggie. The other two that failed were raided WD1001FALS drives. I can’t say that the data is critical but it would be very convenient to recover it.
So here is my thought. Since the heads and patters are OK (I assume), can the working PCB from another WD1001FALS that had a head crash be used in my drive just to get the data off of it?
No two drives are identical. Each drive stores unique, drive specific information in a flash memory chip. When swapping boards, you need to transfer this chip, or its contents, to the donor. Some boards have an 8-pin external flash memory chip at location U12, which makes this job relatively easy. However, if U12 is vacant, then the “adaptive” data are internal to the MCU, in your case the Marvell chip (big “M”).
If you are lucky, then the boards will have been protected by the 5V and 12V TVS diodes at D3 and D4 near the SATA power connector. If so, then the fix is to remove the shorted diodes with flush cutters. The drive will wok without them, but it will no longer have overvoltage protection on the affected supply rail. You also need to check the zero-ohm resistors at R64 and R67. These sometimes go open like fuses. If so, then bridge them with a short wire link, or a blob of solder.
If you need more help, then upload detailed photos of the component sides of each PCB.
Wow! I have the exact same problem… although in my case, it was my fault.
I read about it and understand that simply replacing the PCB probably won’t work with these HDDs…
" . . . If this is the case many inexperienced technicians will try to swap PCB from another Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS drive of the same model but chances of successful hard drive recovery are close to zero, especially on newer Western Digital hard drives. The problem is that logic board and service area microcode on modern Western Digital hard drives are adapted to the head disk assembly are manufactured with. In our lab we use specialized software, machines and hardware to reprogram and rebuild these parameters or transfer them from damaged board to make donor PCB fully compatible with damaged drive." - http://www.salvagedata.com/hard-drive/western-digital-data-recovery/wd1001fals/
