Seagate HDD - circuit board swap problem (firmware question)

[t3h wizard]

A friend of mine has got a Seagate HDD (ST3100528AS) thas has got dead circuit board. Too sad that he's got lots of personal information there with no backups (as always ).
He's thinking about getting another ST3100528AS disk and borrow its circuit board for data recovery. After that he could put it back and have another working HDD.
The only problem is that this disk is rather old and can be found only somewhere on eBay... there are few of them and mostly they have got a different firmware. Does it matter?

This ST3100528AS has got CC44. I saw on eBay one with CC34.

 

[akseli]

The firmware could be upgraded.
But you want to get the same PCB, not same HDD, as same HDD models may have different PCB boards. Check the PCB model and find a replacement, as the drive is new enough and popular model, you should easily find a replacement board, they are plenty of people offering them and usually additional advices.

Also most PCBs have additional info about the specific drive it's on, some calibration data and such. I don't know anything more about it but it's very possible it needs to be transferred too, from the old PCB.
See some info from http://www.onepcbsolution.com/fitr.html

Though to me, it doesn't look too hard to disconnect and replace the small memory chip as long as you get a working PCB.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/272106-32-swap-bios-hard-drive

 

[t3h wizard]

Ok, thanks! So I'll probably will recommend him getting some PCB and if nothing goes on then one should do some soldering as well
Thanks.