Help an old lady save her data... Western Digital Hard Drive recovery

[TangleWeb]

You all may remember a post I made recently about a problem system that turned out to be a failed Western Digital Hard Drive that prevented the system from even powering on.

Ruslan mentioned switching the drive electronics from another drive to get to the data.

I fear I may only have one chance. I'm looking for advice\comments, etc. from techs that have done this.

Drive is a Western Digital Caviar AC310100. It is 10141.2 MB.

My questions;

1) Does the controller circuit board have to be from exactly the same drive model? Or will a circuit board from another Western Digital work?

2) How does the circuit board connect to the drive? What should I watch for during the swap?

3) ANY other advice about this.

NOTE: I have other WD drives, but none in the 10 GB range. The newest (biggest) would be a 4.3 GB Caviar. It is bad, but the electronics are fine. It's the media that's bad.

Help Gurus!!!

[Milenko]

I've done it successfully on Maxtor drives that where not the same model. I just took a look at the electronics and made sure that they looked kinda close, then switched them. Everything worked out fine and I got all the data off to another drive via ghost. I must say that I've never done this with a WD drive, but I have noticed that most of their electronics appear to be the same.

Might as well give it a try, if the data appears to be gone already, then you won't look that bad!!!!!! <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0">

[condor]

as far as I know you cannot replace Electronics between all drives..

some models however, have the same electronics - I think 10 to 4 GB gap is too much...

try to get (on ebay or left overs..) an identical drive and switch the circuit board..
It's can be done and works fine...

[bdunn]

Its a longshot but have you tried putting this drive as a slave to another IDE drive.

I had a customer who brought in a dead machine. The onboard electronics had failed so it no longer operates by itself but the drive works fine as a slave drive.

If this works you can copy the drive to another drive and either pull the old drive or leave it as a slave.

[TangleWeb]

Thanks for all replies!

BDUNN, If this drive is connected to a PC, even with NO IDE CONNECTION, that system will NOT power up. The drive electronics are shorted somehow causing the connected drive to prevent the PC from starting up at all. My only hope (short of very expensive data recovery services) is to replace the drive controller circuit board long enough to recover the data.

By the way, the data I want to recover is a couple of Word, Excel & Publisher documents totaling less than 5 MB. They represent a great deal of time on the part of this elderly (Turned 88 this month) lady.

If anybody has a bad Western Digital Caviar hard drive in this same size range (10 GB) I would be willing to pay a reasonable price for it to salvage the drive controller. The drive would have to be bad due to media, NOT drive electronics for it to be usable in this manner.