mike13 Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 I have a three year old 500 GB Seagate dead hard drive. It does not spin. A friend looked at it and said there are tiny brown marks on the controller. He said if I found another similar hard drive and replaced the controller. it might work. I just want to retrieve the pictures on the hard drive. I see identical used hard drives on Ebay for under $20.00 Is there a chance that his idea would work, or would I be waisting my time and money. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim K Global Moderator Posted July 1, 2016 Global Moderator Share Posted July 1, 2016 Maybe...but probably not? It is getting harder to replace logic boards (not sure about your Seagate) because manufactures are storing specific drive parameters in the BIOS IC relating to that specific drive. Anyway, you could always try getting the exact same model ... and I mean the exact same (down to the revision number) and trying it. However, if it doesn't work it could result in permanent data loss. You may have to swap out the BIOS IC ... which is difficult (unless you are good with a soldering iron). Recommendation: -I'd recommend taking a look at these various sites... http://www.hdd-parts.com/ http://www.onepcbsolution.com/ http://www.hddzone.com/ Which can give you more information about your particular logic board/HDD ... and if you need to swap the BIOS IC. Some of the above sites will do it free (you ship them your bad board and they do the replacement). Please note. I've never used the sites I listed so can not vouch for their work. They do have detailed information about the various logic boards for just about every HDD though. T3X4S 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mike13 Posted July 1, 2016 Author Share Posted July 1, 2016 Thanks jjkusaf for the reply. I will look into the info. you supplied. Thanks for your Military Service. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
T3X4S Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 I'll just rehash what jjkusaf said. You have to find an exact replacement or it wont work. Everything has to be the same (except the S/N obviously The Rev #, everything - The bigger issue is why wouldnt you have a backup ? That is just common sense ... well ... sense isnt common so I take that back. Next time - use cloud storage for backup Anibal P 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nekrosoft13 Posted July 1, 2016 Share Posted July 1, 2016 22 minutes ago, T3X4S said: I'll just rehash what jjkusaf said. You have to find an exact replacement or it wont work. Everything has to be the same (except the S/N obviously The Rev #, everything - The bigger issue is why wouldnt you have a backup ? That is just common sense ... well ... sense isnt common so I take that back. Next time - use cloud storage for backup i had a similar situation... I had a dead seagate drive, and I bought a replacement drive to get the board from ebay. model number matched part number matched country of origin matched firmware matched date was off by a month and no dice, after getting the drive, taking the board out, I noticed two chips on the board being different, and nothing worked. T3X4S 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DevTech Posted July 2, 2016 Share Posted July 2, 2016 14 hours ago, mike13 said: I have a three year old 500 GB Seagate dead hard drive. It does not spin. A friend looked at it and said there are tiny brown marks on the controller. He said if I found another similar hard drive and replaced the controller. it might work. I just want to retrieve the pictures on the hard drive. I see identical used hard drives on Ebay for under $20.00 Is there a chance that his idea would work, or would I be waisting my time and money. Thanks. This worked for older drives. Your drive is too new. There is no BIOS chip anymore on the controller board. All the parameters and other essential info is on the magnetic platter itself and is loaded on power up because it saves a penny or two on the unit cost but the data is usually encrypted with a unique encryption key embedded on the controller board. So even if you get an exact controller board match up, it simply will not work. The #1 most common cause of the drive not spinning is the bearings are seized in the drive spindle. So the procedure is simple. Buy an exact match to your drive. Look up which chip on the controller board has the encryption key. De-solder that chip from the bad drive and solder it to the new drive's controller board. Make a clean room. Open both drives. Remove the platters from the good drive. Move the platters from the bad drive to the good drive. Recover the data to a third drive. Throw out both of the drives you opened because they are still too contaminated. The hard part is the clean room. (moving the platters are tricky so you should practice on some scrap drives first) If you like that sort of fun, I have seen hobbyists make a clean room out of plastic and a big air blower/filter - you only need about 3 ft by 3ft... Disclaimer Notice: I don't seriously expect you to follow these steps. If you do, you chances of success are extremely low. There are a lot of failure modes in the process. If you keep trying, you will get the hang of it like every other skill in life and it could be a fun hobby but it is starting to look like hard drives as we know them will be extinct in a few years... If the data is important, hopefully you can see why the recovery prices are so high. I know how painful data loss can be. It is also painful to think how many human beings will have to experience this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DevTech Posted July 2, 2016 Share Posted July 2, 2016 5 hours ago, nekrosoft13 said: i had a similar situation... I had a dead seagate drive, and I bought a replacement drive to get the board from ebay. model number matched part number matched country of origin matched firmware matched date was off by a month and no dice, after getting the drive, taking the board out, I noticed two chips on the board being different, and nothing worked. Depending on how new the drive is you probably just need to move the chip with the encryption key from the old controller board to the new one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ndoggfromhell Posted July 5, 2016 Share Posted July 5, 2016 You can actually purchase a tool to assist in removing the drive bearing and replacing it with a bearing from a donor drive. I did this once for a coworker who had a lot of videos on a 1.5Tb Seagate drive. He did not have a backup, and understood the odds were stacked against it working. We did get the drive to spin up again, we successfully copied the data over to a new drive, we powered off the drive and it never worked again. Side note... ###### head managed to not back up these files again and had a 3TB western digital fail. Drive heads exploded inside (we eventually opened it up for science) Luckily the spare I used initially to move his files over still had them on it. He has since understood to backup with a second destination for EVERYTHING. DevTech 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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