Beware if you are thinking to swap the printed circuit board (PCB) of a dead hard drive. The first thing you should know is whether your PCB is bad. PCB supplies power to the hard drive and also acts as a brain of the hard drive. If any hard drive is not spinning then sometimes it indicates a faulty PCB. If you care for your data, you should not take any chance to try PCB swapping as it can lead to make your data permanently Unrecoverable!
Switching boards in legacy hard drive for certain models could sometime rectify the issue because of generic PCB and firmware. There was a possibility that using same firmware, site code and part number would allow access to data in some cases. Nowadays, in many cases hard drives comes with unique information of the drive on controller board so if it is swapped the microcode on PCB will not be matched with the drive data. As an outcome, it would start making clicking noise or would not be recognized by BIOS. Sometimes it could lead to more damage or even catch fire!
Firmware information may be embedded in MCU (Micro Controlling Unit), depending on hard drive models. It is required to write the firmware information to functioning matching PCB with the use of specialist tools. For some models you may face the issue of ROM incompatibility even if the firmware and configuration code is similar and it will require a ROM chip transplant. The “adaptive data” inside the PCB is unique to the attached hard drive. It consists of information like heads, firmware, service area and bad sectors.
To accomplish a successful PCB swap, special tools are required and sometimes it involves manual moving of ROM chip to donor PCB. Make sure that you hold the original PCB and don’t throw it away as it consists of invaluable information essential for data recovery.
If time and data are important, consult data recovery professional. Needless to mention that Techchef has got all the world class tools and technologies backed by years of hand on experience to recover your precious data. Call us now: 1800-313-1737 for Free Analysis of your dead hard drive.
