Changing hard drive controller boards

[JJonas]

A work colleague bought her Seagate hard drive in as it had stopped working.

 

Having taken a look at it, it appears as though the controller board on the drive has blown.

 

I remember hearing it was possible to swap the controller board over from another working drive.

 

I have located another Seagate drive and removed the board and as far as I can tell they look the same.

 

What sort of things should I check for before replacing the blown board? has anyone else on Edugeek tried this? do you have any guides/tips?

[Norphy]

It may work, it may not. Both drives need to be of the same make, model and capacity for it to work.

 

The other thing to take into account is that the firmware on the drives keeps track of the bad sector count and locations. Swapping over the controller boards will mean that the bad sector map will be wrong. This might not be too much trouble but you may come across some file corruption because of this.

 

Anyway, it doesn't sound like you have much to lose so as long as you don't mind sacrificing your drive to the cause, I'd give it a shot.

 

/edit Both boards need to have the same firmware version too.

Edited February 29, 2016 by Norphy

[difinity]

Is there a component that has burnt up ? Something shorted ? Does the drive make any noise ? Check the two TVS diodes and ensure the contacts are clean off corrosion.

What's the model number of the drive ?

 

See if this helps. Donor Drives Blog - Head Swap Donor Matching Guide

[MatthewL]

Seen it done a few months ago, like for like and didn't seem to cause any issues. Did the job to retrieve the data but there are so many variables, firmware been one.

[JJonas]

Not enough of my drive info matches, so not doing this but thanks for the info.

[Fazza]

I've changed the controller board on a HDD before and it worked a treat and I was able to get all the data off of it.

 

Like others have said, it needs to be a like-for-like hard disk drive which is an advantage of being in a school as we dont tend to buy one computer at a time but a whole computer suite etc. so it's more likely than not that you'll have access to another HDD that is exactly the same. If not then eBay might be worth a try.