Question Western Digital HDD swap U12 chip

[Ken Anderson]

After nearly four years of back & forth with a blown HDD, I've finally gotten my drive to spin. But now, my U12 chip from the original board (the controller chip) doesn't seem to work. I've swapped the chip and literally NOTHING happens: no USB connected tone, no spin, nothing. So I swapped the chips back and the drive spins but it's not recognized by the computer.

I'm at my wit's end here folks... we had a power surge 4 years ago and that was back when I didn't think I'd ever have to worry about it. It had tons of all my important files & photos. My mom died a few months ago and everything from when I was a kid up until I was 35 are still on the hard drive. I'm getting desperate and I don't have the money to get it professionally recovered. Anybody have any advice?

 

[USAFRet]

My mom died a few months ago and everything from when I was a kid up until I was 35 are still on the hard drive.

Stop screwing with it.

If the data is that important to you, spend the $$$ and give it to a real data recovery company.

 

[DSzymborski]

Yup, there's no other option at this point. Unfortunately, the only time to save data is *before* a hard drive breaks, through having multiple backups of important things. Other than that, if the drive can't be read by any OS, then it's either send it to professional or bust.

 

[fzabkar]

Can you upload a detailed photo of the original PCB? Some simple diagnosis should tell us how the board died and whether the ROM could also have died at the same time.

Assuming you didn't kill the IC, can you dump its contents with a programmer? I have written a tool to check the ROM, if you get this far.

https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?p=22310#p22310

https://web.archive.org/web/20230407181533/www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/FreeBasic_W32/WD/wdROMv17.exe

https://web.archive.org/web/2023073...on.net/~fzabkar/FreeBasic_W32/WD/wdROMv17.bas

Some WD models have a critical firmware module in U12. Can you tell us the HDD model number?