New shop, new intro and logo you’re doing well. Love your content, keep up the good work 😊 Start regretting all the old stuff I threw away 6 years ago 😂
Good save there Graham. Clear and concise, with no waffle with nothing to sell. Like the new titles/logo. Shop is looking good as well. Keep up great work.
You are my computer repairman hero!! You give me the confidence to try more difficult repairs. Still I'm not good at soldering, but always learn something from your videos. Keep up the good work Sir!
Graham, you are one of the most gifted techs on you tube. I don't understand why your subscriptions are as low as they are. When compared to someone like Cary Holzman who doesn't have a shadow of the talent as you do. He spends most of his time on begging for money than he does on computer repair. Rant over! Keep up with the great videos.
@Mr Guru This sounds very disrespectful and tells me more about you than it does about Holzman, chances are none of these people are gifted, they spend time with stuff and get results because of this, Graham isn't some demi-god that descended from the skies, he's just like us. Also keep in mind how much it helps other people to see Holzman build stuff, debug PC's etc.
@Mr Guru I understand, I just wanted to share my thoughts, calling people names will just make them not want to have a discussion, I've been on the internet long enough to see where this goes, I wish you the best.
This cheered me up after a bad day in the workshop with multiple component failure on massively thick PCBs with tiny surface mount everything on it and through hole sub-PCBs - this happened 3 times in a row with different devices. None of which got fixed.😭😭😭😭😭😭Wah!!! indeed. Sore eyes and fingers and headache and bad mood.
Thumbs up...researching my own data recovery of a family pic drive gone bad. I've sourced an "Identical" drive like you did. Fingers crossed. Thanks for your expertise in all thing tech related. disclaimers noted as well.
I swapped the boards of a failed IDE drive once 15-years ago and it worked fine, allowing me to copy my data off the drive. It failed a day later, but did let me grab my data so it was a success! You could restore the new board with the original ROM and put it back on the new drive, giving you a brand new one to use. As it hasn't even spun up, it should be fine to use.
I actually recall your statement of "if components start getting blown around, then turn the air flow down". This was coming from someone who wasn't sure what the hell was going on when I first got my hotair station, the biggest suprise was how dam hot the PCB boards were getting, I was thinking this shit could fry an egg given the heat it gets to. I also think the distance from the board makes a difference, so you can decrease the airflow but put it closer and technically you should get the same effect, since if you take the air flow and the distance from the board as the frequency of how many hot air particles are traveling from the nozzle to the board then by decreasing the air flow and bringing the nozzle closer should keep the temperatures around the same.
i never had to but something i read is: rather than swapping chips one can get a same model/make working donor drive WITH THE SAME GEOMETRY, boot it up, hotswap the board to the driver to recover. what's going to be missing is mainly the negative sector data which is the SMART reports and the reallocated sector map plus some other things BUT the platter will spin and heads move and data flow.
What fun :) I had the exact same chip (by smooth) going cactus yesterday and swapped it. That did the job. Those chips are more common that the chance of running into the exact same control board. Great to see you managed the fix :)
Thanks Graham that was great. When you first started I said to myself just swop the board over why mess about with removing chips, then you answered and said it was that smaller chip that holds the way the drive has stored everything and just swapping the board won't work, it was like you heard me lol. I still have a couple of older drives that are not SATA connection, I keep meaning to look on them to see what is there, I have a drive dock with those connections on. Anyway Graham you did a good job and I'm sure the customer will be very happy, well done mate.
Use R studio for getting everything off the drive, and another brilliant piece of kit would be a pc3000 and a deepspar 4 DDI, I've used both when I was a data recovery technician
data recovery is a very interesting thing for me. Finding content on it is kinda difficult as people want to protect their methods. I've found a couple channels, but the uploads are sporadic
I once had 1 GB IBM laptop HDDs, where I could easily swap the boards without issues. IBM DMCA21080 and DMCA21440 was their model number. I was poor and I trashpicked these drives from laptop repair shops for about a dollar or two.
I do like u a lot dude. You are so down to earth. I like this way like you are. If i would live in the UK, than i will come to your shop. But i am also a computer repair guy.
I had even more luck with recovering data from the exact same drive! I had one with the same motor controller chip burnt to a crisp and I was able to take the exact donor board and hot swap it without even swapping the ROM chip and it worked like a charm! I was in disbelief myself, but it was a 100% successful recovery! I'm fact, I think the drive is ironically still being used to this day, not as a primary or a backup drive, but I believe it's a backup of a backup or something like that, lol!
For the HD dock I have one: tacens -portum duo II- usb3. 1 And I recommend, is old but you can find new. Have 2 docks (only can read from the 1dock) but can clone hard drive alone (no matter the operating system or file system"in some cases you need to initialize the HD only don't need formatting ").only push a button a few seconds and strat cloning from dock1 to dock2 (always check or you erase the hard drive) . Suport HD3, 5/2, 5 and ssd (and iff buy adaptors for any ssd tipe to sata can do the same)
Sometimes could be just dirty/oxydized heads contacts and a scrub make the day. I revived a disk once with just a pencil eraser. The donor one looks quite nasty indeed.
Personally, I would have refitted the chip by cleaning all the old solder off then using a soldering iron, fixing one pin, then doing the rest of the pins. Especially if you're going to go over it with an iron anyway. Much less chance of heat damaging nearby components.
I found the WD Caviar Green to be the worst drives. I've had several fail prematurely and have since avoided buying them. I have been using, Black, Red and Purple and all are still going strong after nearly 10 years of service.
Now that I think of it I can't recall having a WD go bad. Sure I stopped using them after so many years, probably not more than 10, but also have had plenty of Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi, IBM drives die.
@@ravneiv call it lack of luck, but every Seagate I've had, aside for a handful, have failed. I used to build around 30 pcs a year as a side hobby for people at work etc., had so many Seagate failures it just put me off. I know, 'cos I've done it recently, I can still hook up one of these WDs and they just work.
The reason you should use Linux is, that Windows cannot leave mounted drives alone and will write stuff, where Linux only reads, leading to less risk for additional damage. Not really relevant for this drive, but something to keep in mind.
There is a workaround, that will solve that problem at least in my cases it did: Remove the drive letter from all partitions on the drive. This can be done from windows disk management. If you are doing this sort of stuff on a regular basis, you can also disable windows from automatically assigning drive letters (cmd -> diskpart --> automount disable). In that state, windows will still give you hardware-access to the drive, so you will have sector-level access (for imaging or other recovery software), but windows will not mount the file system, so windows cannot interfere with the recover and the explorer won't freeze on read-errors.
I am all too familiar with the clicking of death on my mechanical hard drives. I still keep a dead one around as a paperweight. The fault in it is not electronic, though.
2 tools that really don't cost much that would help out greatly. get a Hakko bottom heater and a Hakko vise (looks like a cylinder). It really makes it much easier to desolder ICs and even BGA.
Data recovery is hard. Every timed ive succeeded its been more of a lucky strike than any real skill or ability on my part I fear :( And yes low airflow, high temp is the key to hot air. Only thing I use max airflow for is cooling down the air station Gj
I have a hard drive here which i am sure is the same.I brought a donor board to get the chip replaced but about 20 telephone calls to repair shops here in new zealand none can replace the chip so i never progressed further.
I had some 250GB WD drives in a RAID5 array. After about a year one of the disks failed so I sent it back to WD under warranty. While waiting for the replacement, a second drive in the array failed so of course that was the end of the data :( And the replacements WD sent me were not new but refurbished. I've never touched WD drives since. (I did manage to recover the data using the still good disk, one of the broken disks and a clever bit of software that understood RAID and rebuilt the files sector by sector)
unfortunate, i had a run with seagate 320gb drives dying and havent touched them again either . WD only now and have been lucky.... thats the most important part.. luck
@@OPTIMUS6LTR Isn't it funny. I've had WD failures and have never had a Seagate fail on me. I worked in the corporate environment for a company that used Seagate SCSIs and WD IDEs. It worked for them and they had minimal failures. Go figure.
@@josephking6515 i should clarify currently have 7x16tb HC550s which are actually Hitachi relabeled WD so that could explain it.. but have had luck with Red drives also, Blues never really touched Greens i had ok luck with.
Oh, didn't know about that little ROM chip! Lots of years ago I replaced the whole board of a 320GB drive, and the drive performance absolutely went down, with ridiculously slow read speeds. I was able to recover the data though, so I still think the investment was worth it (the board alone was like 50% the value of a new drive). Now I know why it didn't work like expected. I guess I was lucky it worked at all!
Yea I like the Pinecil a lot. My only complaint is that the rubber grip feels nice but has actually been slipping as of late, I need to put a little bit of double-sided tape under it. I've also been hearing a lot of good things about the Miniware TS101, but no idea what the cost/availability of it is like.
I have one for M.2 drives, but for HDDs this little stardock has never let me down. USB bridges are not advised for data recovery, but I lucked out on mine, it seems to work very well.
@@Adamant_IT Ahh the Inateck one I have is very good. Never had issue. Even great for cloning over Xbox drives. I did my original 500GB to an SSD a while ago.. Dunno about PS drives though
I have a problematic 8 tb drive that used to shut down randomly (until I used a right-angle data cable that doesn't press against the side panel). I noticed it has a slight crack in the material of the connector (close to where the pins are). Assuming that's the cause, hypothetically speaking would you be able to fix that?
will this still work if the donor board has different chips? same pcb, same board number, the chips do the same things but are of different manufacturers, any issues with still doing the eeprom swap for such a case? the drive in question is an old ide drive that i am unable to determine which component is responsible for it being unresponsive, no obvious burn marks
That's exactly what I was thinking. Once the data was secure, resolder the 'new' chip back onto the 'new' board and put it back on the 'new' drive and the copy data across. It would seem a waste to have chucked that brand new donor drive in the bin.
Can you make a video on how you made and run your repair shop? It seems really difficult for me yo imagine how id be able to run a profitable business lol
Yes, because the ROM chip data relates to the disk geometry as well. A loose analogy would be; Imagine you have a wall of filing cabinets labelled as columns and rows. Some of the draws are jammed and don't open, so you have a Custom label on them saying 'don't use this one'. Some of the draw labels are swapped around to put a specific label in an easier to reach location. Now imagine all the Custom labels are removed. The contents of the cabinets is all still there, but all that extra information about where some stuff is, what drawers are jammed, etc, is now lost, so the drive needs to build up all this info again - and some of it may be lost forever, which could result in permanently degraded performance.
Why not first: try swapping in ONLY the donor circuit board? Then if the drive can't be read, go on to swapping the soldered chips. Thus potentially saving some time, if a circuit board swap alone would suffice.
@@cjmillsnun All I'm saying is: first see if it works, without the extra effort of de-soldering/soldering. Maybe the rom is capable of re-learning when applied to the new spinning drive. There should be very little chance of doing any kind of data damage while in read-only mode, and could have saved some repair effort.
I have similarly swapped hdd boards without messing with the eeprom just fine and that's the safest way. But if you must, first get a $10 eeprom reader and back up both. Also, if you learn how to interpret wd model numbers you can match more compatible donor boards.
Brother how much do you charge for this? I have recently done a recovery by the same methods and charged £170 for labour. I recovered 350gb of family photos, Is that fair in the current market?
It seems to vary by country a lot. Data recovery in the UK is very expensive. If you send the drive to a lab and they need to rebuild it (take apart the mechanics, etc) I would expect a bill of £700-£1400. I don't charge anywhere near this amount, because my data recovery methods are for easier jobs like this - I don't have the skill or equipment to rebuild a HDD.
"If you don't look for lucky fixes you'll never find them." Sooo true ! 👍👍
What like checking the bios date ???? lol never knew that could be a problem but glad you got it sorted in the end.
@@drayton359 Not valid in this instance, as it was clear the motor controller was bunt out.
New shop, new intro and logo you’re doing well. Love your content, keep up the good work 😊
Start regretting all the old stuff I threw away 6 years ago 😂
Good save there Graham. Clear and concise, with no waffle with nothing to sell. Like the new titles/logo. Shop is looking good as well. Keep up great work.
You are my computer repairman hero!! You give me the confidence to try more difficult repairs. Still I'm not good at soldering, but always learn something from your videos. Keep up the good work Sir!
Graham, you are one of the most gifted techs on you tube. I don't understand why your subscriptions are as low as they are. When compared to someone like Cary Holzman who doesn't have a shadow of the talent as you do. He spends most of his time on begging for money than he does on computer repair. Rant over! Keep up with the great videos.
@Mr Guru This sounds very disrespectful and tells me more about you than it does about Holzman, chances are none of these people are gifted, they spend time with stuff and get results because of this, Graham isn't some demi-god that descended from the skies, he's just like us. Also keep in mind how much it helps other people to see Holzman build stuff, debug PC's etc.
@Mr Guru I understand, I just wanted to share my thoughts, calling people names will just make them not want to have a discussion, I've been on the internet long enough to see where this goes, I wish you the best.
Graham is the best kept secret.
@@ramireini FWIW, the OP is correct about Holzman. I watched Holzman for a while, before I knew any better.
@@nian60 That's not an argument, what changed? How was Holzman wrong and about what? Tell us the process, I want to know.
This cheered me up after a bad day in the workshop with multiple component failure on massively thick PCBs with tiny surface mount everything on it and through hole sub-PCBs - this happened 3 times in a row with different devices. None of which got fixed.😭😭😭😭😭😭Wah!!! indeed. Sore eyes and fingers and headache and bad mood.
Thumbs up...researching my own data recovery of a family pic drive gone bad. I've sourced an "Identical" drive like you did. Fingers crossed. Thanks for your expertise in all thing tech related. disclaimers noted as well.
I swapped the boards of a failed IDE drive once 15-years ago and it worked fine, allowing me to copy my data off the drive. It failed a day later, but did let me grab my data so it was a success!
You could restore the new board with the original ROM and put it back on the new drive, giving you a brand new one to use. As it hasn't even spun up, it should be fine to use.
Two things, that could be pointed out:
1) As others have already said, these controller boards can be bought on their own - usually very cheap (
Great stuff, admire your soldering skills
Fancy finding you here Mike!
@@lagpi Graham is the boss, I learn a lot from these videos
I actually recall your statement of "if components start getting blown around, then turn the air flow down". This was coming from someone who wasn't sure what the hell was going on when I first got my hotair station, the biggest suprise was how dam hot the PCB boards were getting, I was thinking this shit could fry an egg given the heat it gets to.
I also think the distance from the board makes a difference, so you can decrease the airflow but put it closer and technically you should get the same effect, since if you take the air flow and the distance from the board as the frequency of how many hot air particles are traveling from the nozzle to the board then by decreasing the air flow and bringing the nozzle closer should keep the temperatures around the same.
i never had to but something i read is:
rather than swapping chips one can get a same model/make working donor drive WITH THE SAME GEOMETRY, boot it up, hotswap the board to the driver to recover.
what's going to be missing is mainly the negative sector data which is the SMART reports and the reallocated sector map plus some other things BUT the platter will spin and heads move and data flow.
Wow an old Win2K/XP drive. Nice that you were able to get the exact controller board.
I’m not sure what I enjoy more , watching your repairs are hearing some of your fun English terms for dead pieces of hardware.
Good fix Graham. Really interesting
Enjoyable watch, thanks.
oh, i love videos like this, thanks for sharing
You've learned me a big thing,replacing same board is useless until you replace this rom.
What fun :)
I had the exact same chip (by smooth) going cactus yesterday and swapped it. That did the job.
Those chips are more common that the chance of running into the exact same control board.
Great to see you managed the fix :)
Thanks Graham that was great. When you first started I said to myself just swop the board over why mess about with removing chips, then you answered and said it was that smaller chip that holds the way the drive has stored everything and just swapping the board won't work, it was like you heard me lol. I still have a couple of older drives that are not SATA connection, I keep meaning to look on them to see what is there, I have a drive dock with those connections on. Anyway Graham you did a good job and I'm sure the customer will be very happy, well done mate.
Use R studio for getting everything off the drive, and another brilliant piece of kit would be a pc3000 and a deepspar 4 DDI, I've used both when I was a data recovery technician
data recovery is a very interesting thing for me. Finding content on it is kinda difficult as people want to protect their methods. I've found a couple channels, but the uploads are sporadic
Great work 👌
I always wondered what data was in the hdd eeprom, and thanks to you, now I know it's the calibration data.
@Mr Guru thank you
I did this 'back in the day' of MFM drives of whopping 10 Mb capacity. I had a X clone with two of them.
I once had 1 GB IBM laptop HDDs, where I could easily swap the boards without issues. IBM DMCA21080 and DMCA21440 was their model number. I was poor and I trashpicked these drives from laptop repair shops for about a dollar or two.
I yelled "Yes!" when the data was there. 🤣 Hey, I'm a tech too. 🤜🏻🤛🏻
You can use Rufus to create a copy of the drive. You can then attach it as a VHD in the Disk management as a drive.
Yes thanks, this was very interesting. 💖
This was informative thanks bro
Great disclaimer at the start and a really enjoyable video - keep up the good work :-)
Great content as usual. I still think that the background where u had various motherboards hung on the wall, was cool tech.
great job Graham - also love the new logo very eye catching!!!!!
I do like u a lot dude. You are so down to earth. I like this way like you are. If i would live in the UK, than i will come to your shop. But i am also a computer repair guy.
Thanks for that !
interesting work well done .
I had even more luck with recovering data from the exact same drive! I had one with the same motor controller chip burnt to a crisp and I was able to take the exact donor board and hot swap it without even swapping the ROM chip and it worked like a charm! I was in disbelief myself, but it was a 100% successful recovery! I'm fact, I think the drive is ironically still being used to this day, not as a primary or a backup drive, but I believe it's a backup of a backup or something like that, lol!
@@Aneesh.Asokan Dead serious! It worked 100%... It was for my pastor's PC... Wouldn't lie about that!!!
@@Aneesh.Asokan lol... I totally agree, I was extremely surprised when it actually worked myself!
For the HD dock I have one: tacens -portum duo II- usb3. 1
And I recommend, is old but you can find new. Have 2 docks (only can read from the 1dock) but can clone hard drive alone (no matter the operating system or file system"in some cases you need to initialize the HD only don't need formatting ").only push a button a few seconds and strat cloning from dock1 to dock2 (always check or you erase the hard drive) .
Suport HD3, 5/2, 5 and ssd (and iff buy adaptors for any ssd tipe to sata can do the same)
this was excellent well done!
Well done.
Those WD drivers are a sight to behold.
Nice work
Great video
thanks i have a drive like that but trouble getting the doner drive
Sometimes could be just dirty/oxydized heads contacts and a scrub make the day. I revived a disk once with just a pencil eraser. The donor one looks quite nasty indeed.
Personally, I would have refitted the chip by cleaning all the old solder off then using a soldering iron, fixing one pin, then doing the rest of the pins. Especially if you're going to go over it with an iron anyway. Much less chance of heat damaging nearby components.
Awesome content
My spidey sense is tingling ... "Bitcoin wallet" forgot inside, :-)
I found the WD Caviar Green to be the worst drives. I've had several fail prematurely and have since avoided buying them. I have been using, Black, Red and Purple and all are still going strong after nearly 10 years of service.
I really enjoyed that bud😊
This guy is goooood!
That drive is, what, about 17+ years old? WD have always been solid for me. (and then we see a date later)
Now that I think of it I can't recall having a WD go bad. Sure I stopped using them after so many years, probably not more than 10, but also have had plenty of Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, Hitachi, IBM drives die.
It's astonishing they don't fail more often. Or cost 10x what they do. Aerospace grade mechanical engineering.
@@ravneiv call it lack of luck, but every Seagate I've had, aside for a handful, have failed. I used to build around 30 pcs a year as a side hobby for people at work etc., had so many Seagate failures it just put me off. I know, 'cos I've done it recently, I can still hook up one of these WDs and they just work.
@@saintuk70 Seagte have historically been very poor for PC drives. Weirdly the AV ones in my TV recording boxes have lastest for years though!
The reason you should use Linux is, that Windows cannot leave mounted drives alone and will write stuff, where Linux only reads, leading to less risk for additional damage.
Not really relevant for this drive, but something to keep in mind.
There is a workaround, that will solve that problem at least in my cases it did: Remove the drive letter from all partitions on the drive. This can be done from windows disk management. If you are doing this sort of stuff on a regular basis, you can also disable windows from automatically assigning drive letters (cmd -> diskpart --> automount disable).
In that state, windows will still give you hardware-access to the drive, so you will have sector-level access (for imaging or other recovery software), but windows will not mount the file system, so windows cannot interfere with the recover and the explorer won't freeze on read-errors.
Advice for everyone is to backup your data to prevent data loss.👍
Yeah, I like your new intro too. I miss your old intro music a bit though.
thanks
I am all too familiar with the clicking of death on my mechanical hard drives. I still keep a dead one around as a paperweight. The fault in it is not electronic, though.
I like the old intro music.
2 tools that really don't cost much that would help out greatly. get a Hakko bottom heater and a Hakko vise (looks like a cylinder). It really makes it much easier to desolder ICs and even BGA.
Greaat job.
How lucky! Board swaps are easy money.
Data recovery is hard. Every timed ive succeeded its been more of a lucky strike than any real skill or ability on my part I fear :(
And yes low airflow, high temp is the key to hot air. Only thing I use max airflow for is cooling down the air station
Gj
Yes, everybody knows only real Scotsman have real skillz and abilities. Everybody else doesn't eat haggis or sucks at life. 😂
I have a hard drive here which i am sure is the same.I brought a donor board to get the chip replaced but about 20 telephone calls to repair shops here in new zealand none can replace the chip so i never progressed further.
Most shops will not carry out board repair especially on a spinning hdd. They just swap boards out..
Great job
You did a good job.
I had some 250GB WD drives in a RAID5 array. After about a year one of the disks failed so I sent it back to WD under warranty. While waiting for the replacement, a second drive in the array failed so of course that was the end of the data :( And the replacements WD sent me were not new but refurbished. I've never touched WD drives since. (I did manage to recover the data using the still good disk, one of the broken disks and a clever bit of software that understood RAID and rebuilt the files sector by sector)
what brand do you use now?
unfortunate, i had a run with seagate 320gb drives dying and havent touched them again either . WD only now and have been lucky.... thats the most important part.. luck
@@OPTIMUS6LTR Isn't it funny. I've had WD failures and have never had a Seagate fail on me. I worked in the corporate environment for a company that used Seagate SCSIs and WD IDEs. It worked for them and they had minimal failures. Go figure.
@@lm_dccxl4078 Samsung, not had any issues with them.
@@josephking6515 i should clarify currently have 7x16tb HC550s which are actually Hitachi relabeled WD so that could explain it.. but have had luck with Red drives also, Blues never really touched Greens i had ok luck with.
Like the new intro graphic, but I prefer the old music.
Excelente trabajo, desconocia Snapshot
cracking repair job that! would you do a video on how you got started at some point?
hey bud well done
ADAM ANT IT
Oh, didn't know about that little ROM chip! Lots of years ago I replaced the whole board of a 320GB drive, and the drive performance absolutely went down, with ridiculously slow read speeds. I was able to recover the data though, so I still think the investment was worth it (the board alone was like 50% the value of a new drive). Now I know why it didn't work like expected. I guess I was lucky it worked at all!
was it an ide drive or sata drive?
@@stephenxs8354 It was a 320GB sata Maxtor drive. Sata 1 I think!
I've destroyed 2 WD HDD with new PSU, haven't changed cables and solution for fix was this.
Hey Graham what is the model number on that star tech usb star tech dock?
Thank you for your videos especially the soldering and bios ones.
The pad is a heatsink pad
Now you have a working drive again - why not consider it as another backup drive instead of transforming it to electronic waste?
How's been your experience with the pinecil? I'm looking forward to buying it.
Yea I like the Pinecil a lot. My only complaint is that the rubber grip feels nice but has actually been slipping as of late, I need to put a little bit of double-sided tape under it.
I've also been hearing a lot of good things about the Miniware TS101, but no idea what the cost/availability of it is like.
I miss the old intro music...we are such creatures of habit....onwards & upwards!!!
Nobody likes change :)
Graham have you considered using a dual caddy? Lots of them have built in disk to disk offline cloning. No PC required
I have one for M.2 drives, but for HDDs this little stardock has never let me down. USB bridges are not advised for data recovery, but I lucked out on mine, it seems to work very well.
@@Adamant_IT Ahh the Inateck one I have is very good. Never had issue. Even great for cloning over Xbox drives. I did my original 500GB to an SSD a while ago.. Dunno about PS drives though
where do get snapshot software?
I have a problematic 8 tb drive that used to shut down randomly (until I used a right-angle data cable that doesn't press against the side panel). I noticed it has a slight crack in the material of the connector (close to where the pins are). Assuming that's the cause, hypothetically speaking would you be able to fix that?
will this still work if the donor board has different chips? same pcb, same board number, the chips do the same things but are of different manufacturers, any issues with still doing the eeprom swap for such a case? the drive in question is an old ide drive that i am unable to determine which component is responsible for it being unresponsive, no obvious burn marks
Great fix. Did you swap the configuration chips back afterwards? (Thus leaving yourself a working new drive.)
@Mr Guru Well yes, but switching the chip back should cover that.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Once the data was secure, resolder the 'new' chip back onto the 'new' board and put it back on the 'new' drive and the copy data across. It would seem a waste to have chucked that brand new donor drive in the bin.
@Mr Guru He didn't do it on the video; if he did I assume it was because it wasn't relevant to the fix. I was just interested. No biggie.
Do the soldering under the microscope so we can see.
wouldn't you wanna test the ebay drive beforehand?
I tried this once. With two exact same model drives. It did not go well.
appreciate your effort on sharing knowledge but you moved the hot PCB what an expert never would do
Can you make a video on how you made and run your repair shop? It seems really difficult for me yo imagine how id be able to run a profitable business lol
quick question: If you don't care about the data on a drive that you want to swap boards on, do you still need to replace the rom chip?
Yes, because the ROM chip data relates to the disk geometry as well. A loose analogy would be;
Imagine you have a wall of filing cabinets labelled as columns and rows. Some of the draws are jammed and don't open, so you have a Custom label on them saying 'don't use this one'. Some of the draw labels are swapped around to put a specific label in an easier to reach location.
Now imagine all the Custom labels are removed. The contents of the cabinets is all still there, but all that extra information about where some stuff is, what drawers are jammed, etc, is now lost, so the drive needs to build up all this info again - and some of it may be lost forever, which could result in permanently degraded performance.
I've done HDD recovery with a straight board swap, maybe just lucky?
@MrTGuru if I remember rightly it was a Seagate 2TB 3.5" drive. Just plugged in the board from a donor.
Do you do data recovery for samsung android devices?
why didnt u used donor board at hole just swap it out ? xD nstead swaping out chips
what model soldering pen is that?
Pine64 Pinecil
nive work, pleas give me the Name from Snapshot Program for Windows, greetings
Get yourself a microscope and save your eyes. Also, what about an extractor fan to save your lungs.
Good fix
Why not first: try swapping in ONLY the donor circuit board? Then if the drive can't be read, go on to swapping the soldered chips. Thus potentially saving some time, if a circuit board swap alone would suffice.
Watch the video, it’s clearly stated at 3:54
That rom contains things like the bad sector list (all hard drives have some bad sectors). Much better to have the one that matches the drive.
@@cjmillsnun All I'm saying is: first see if it works, without the extra effort of de-soldering/soldering. Maybe the rom is capable of re-learning when applied to the new spinning drive. There should be very little chance of doing any kind of data damage while in read-only mode, and could have saved some repair effort.
@@RVail623 To truly put a drove in read only mode you need equipment used for forensic recovery when prohibits any writing to the drive at all.
I have similarly swapped hdd boards without messing with the eeprom just fine and that's the safest way. But if you must, first get a $10 eeprom reader and back up both. Also, if you learn how to interpret wd model numbers you can match more compatible donor boards.
Brother how much do you charge for this?
I have recently done a recovery by the same methods and charged £170 for labour. I recovered 350gb of family photos, Is that fair in the current market?
It seems to vary by country a lot. Data recovery in the UK is very expensive. If you send the drive to a lab and they need to rebuild it (take apart the mechanics, etc) I would expect a bill of £700-£1400.
I don't charge anywhere near this amount, because my data recovery methods are for easier jobs like this - I don't have the skill or equipment to rebuild a HDD.
are you a data recovery expert?
WD kaput
;)
Didn't want to take the like count off of 69. But I had too lol
Every hdd will die, that's why you make bk ups. It does not matter if its wd or segate, they all fail. My bk ups folks. X