Question Replacing PCB Failure

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JCW2021

Nov 2, 2021
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Good evening folks, i'm just wondering if anyone can help me out here.

Some months ago I tried to unscrew a faulty PCB of one of my WD 4TB External HD's. I lost the thread on one of the screws and I therefore had to use a drill to carefully drill through the screw to detach the PCB. I tried to swap the faulty PCB with 4 others from my other 4 external hard drives to access the hard drive but the drive was failing to appear on my laptop and the hard drive clicked a few times.

A few weeks ago I ordered a donor PCB which arrived today and I went about trying to access my drive by directly installing the donor board to my hard drive which already had a BIOS chip on the PCB just to see if it would magically work. I hooked the hard drive up to my laptop to see if my laptop would recognise the drive, I got a couple of clicks from the hard drive and the laptop wasn't recognising it. I tried different USB ports and still the same result. I did however spot the drive being recognised in device manager but was mentioning something along the lines of utilizing?

I then went about taking the BIOS chip of the brand new donor board with a solder iron in order to install the BIOS chip from the original faulty PCB, I then soldered the original BIOS chip to the donor board. Upon connecting the hard drive to my laptop, there didn't appear to be any power going to the hard drive and all I was getting was a quick flash of the light on my hard drive.

I'm wondering, have I possibly damaged the donor board from the heat generating off the solder iron? Please see the attached photos.


https://imgur.com/a/8I04MuM

https://imgur.com/a/zvCmtba

https://imgur.com/a/L7HpHt3
 
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J

JCW2021

Nov 2, 2021
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fzabkar said:
What is the part number of the PCB, ie 2060-8nnnnn?

It looks like you have destroyed some pads. :-(

What was the original symptom?
Click to expand...

That's what I thought, i've possibuly burnt something whilst soldering, i'm not a soldering expert, infact it was the first time trying to solder.

2060-810035-000 REV P0 is the part number.

Actually from what I recall, one of my other drives had an issue with power which turnt out to be the small black plastic piece on the PCB which wasn't soldered correctly, so I tried to take the good PCB of my drive to temporarily install on my other drive to access it but as I drilling the threaded screw, the drill accidently slipped across the PCB and scratched/damaged the good PCB as mentioned in my first post, the drive was in complete good working order before my idiotic mistake.
 
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J

JCW2021

Nov 2, 2021
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USAFRet said:
I know this is futile, but dare I ask if there was a backup of this data?
If not, why not?
And how critical was the data on this/these devices?

The physical drives appear to be shot.
Click to expand...


Sadly the data wasn't backed up. The data was very important to me and ideally I need access to it one way or the other.
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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JCW2021 said:
Sadly the data wasn't backed up. The data was very important to me and ideally I need access to it one way or the other.
Click to expand...


JCW2021 said:
Some months ago I tried to unscrew a faulty PCB of one of my WD 4TB External HD's. I lost the thread on one of the screws and I therefore had to use a drill to carefully drill through the screw to detach the PCB. I tried to swap the faulty PCB with 4 others from my other 4 external hard drives to access the hard drive but the drive was failing to appear on my laptop and the hard drive clicked a few times.
Click to expand...

Stop messing with it.
You're just making things worse.
Far far worse.

Send it to a company that specializes in this.
This will cost $$$.
 
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F

fzabkar

Judicious
Sep 22, 2010
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The 2060-810035 PCB is MCU locked. That is, this PCB has a unique security key in the MCU chip which means that one cannot transfer the ROM to a locked donor PCB.

What you need to do now is to backup the contents of the serial flash memory chip (aka "ROM" or "BIOS"), but you will probably need someone to do this for you.
 
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J

JCW2021

Nov 2, 2021
6
0
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fzabkar said:
The 2060-810035 PCB is MCU locked. That is, this PCB has a unique security key in the MCU chip which means that one cannot transfer the ROM to a locked donor PCB.

What you need to do now is to backup the contents of the serial flash memory chip (aka "ROM" or "BIOS"), but you will probably need someone to do this for you.
Click to expand...

Backing up the ROM or BIOS does sound like a complicated task. Is it likely to be costly if it's just a case of backing up the ROM or BIOS?
 
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J

JCW2021

Nov 2, 2021
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It looks like it's going to have to be a professional repair / data recovery £500-600+. I did have a thought, given my model number is WD40NMZW-11A8NS1, if I was to find another drive with the exact same model number and just swap the PCB's over, would this be an option for the drive to work? Are BIOS chips set to work with precise model numbers?
 
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