Question Reviving a Toshiba HDD ----- can I switch the electronics with that of a VERY similiar Toshiba one ?

[duboverture]

I'll start with only the question itself and if you'd like to know why I think my case is true, there's a short background story in the second part of this post.

I'm almost sure my HDD's electronics died on my hands. I'd like to swap the electronics with another HDD. I tried my best to find the exact same model but can obtain only some with an ALMOST identical label. My dead HDD label says:
Toshiba MK2565GSXN
HDD2J14 B UL01 T
010 A0/GH101M

And the one (or actually many I found around me) are labelled:
Toshiba MK2565GSXN
HDD2J14 B UL01 B
010 A0/GH101M

The only difference between them is this one letter (in bold). Do you know if this is significant in this case?

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Found my old HDD that holds quite important data (Toshiba MK2565GSXN). I tried to connect it to my laptop (Lenovo X230) but after the first attempt to boot the system from it (Windows 7 Aero Blu) it crashed into a bluescreen and never did it again. It's been showing up in BIOS so I tried to mount it with the Porteus linux distro and got the message:
Error reading $MFT: Input/output error
Failed to mount $MFT: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb2': Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. [...and some comment afterwards]

After this event BIOS never detected it again.

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

Electronics meaning, the motherboard on the underside of the HDD? If so, you can give it a try, though please be warned that your mileage can and will vary as there are multiple instances whereby the drive was yet inoperable.

On a side note, perhaps loo into a dock and try tethering the drive to a known working system that already has an OS on it. Again, your mileage can and will vary.

 

[fzabkar]

Toshiba drives have unique calibration data in the "ROM" chip on the PCB (IC602, "BIOS IC"). You must not damage this chip, otherwise your data will be unrecoverable.

In any case, if the drive spins up, then the problem is most likely internal.

https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ay/yhst-14437584971410/91707106-6.gif

 

[duboverture]

Toshiba drives have unique calibration data in the "ROM" chip on the PCB (IC602, "BIOS IC"). You must not damage this chip, otherwise your data will be unrecoverable.

As far as I know, the electronics that I want to swap with has exactly the same BIOS version. Or do you mean that the BIOS/calibration is specific for this one HDD only?

In any case, if the drive spins up, then the problem is most likely internal.

Could you elaborate a little bit? What kind of 'internal' problem could that be? The drive spins, I can feel how it repeats the same procedure.

Just to clarify the thing, I've already tried it with an external USB dock and it also hasn't been detected. The same configuration works with other HDD.

 

[Rokinamerica]

For anyone not the OP... go to your backup... OOOPS...

My rule of thumb...if it is not backed up in multiple places, it is apparently not that important.

 

[DSzymborski]

Just how crucial is this data? If it's truly very important, I think I'd skip excessive tinkering and go straight to a data recovery lab, and accept that I had bad luck and my lesson cost a thousand bucks. People think GPUs are the most expensive things in PCs, but, unfortunately, the most expensive thing is not backing up important data properly.

 

[fzabkar]

By "internal problems", I mean heads or media or both.

The "BIOS" is more appropriately called the "ROM". It contains the operating firmware for the drive plus "CPs". The operating code is common to all drives of the same model with the same firmware version, but the "CPs" are "adaptive" firmware modules containing calibration data which are unique to each drive.

"Adaptives" -- why PCB swaps don't work in modern HDDs:

http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=2600&p=19090#p19090

If you need a pro recovery service, I suggest you ask here:

https://ww.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/new/

The people over there are reasonably priced, competent and trustworthy.

 

[duboverture]

Thanks for the link, it explains a lot.
The IC602 is indeed apparent on the PCB; resoldering it onto a new board wouldn't be any problem, although after your opinion I'm not so sure that this is the way to solve my problem anymore. I just assumed it was very unlikely that it's any physical damage because it worked (a bit) at the beginning of my trials and I didn't drop (or done other harm) since then.

The data kept on this HDD is important to me enough to try my best to recover it, but not crucial. If that would be the case, the disk would already be in hands of professionals.