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Reviving A Dead Hard Drive The Hard Way
An anonymous reader writes "This guy went to the trouble of swapping logic boards on a dead hard drive to get his NeverWinter Nights save games back and took photos." I would have just used a character editor to get my stuff back, but clearly, I lack the dedication this gentleman has. Regardless of reason, nice work!
hmm... so he switched the whole logic board?
I did the same thing with a bunch of 1,6GB western digital hard-drives a few years back, I got a pile of broken ones for free and was able to salvage 4 into working condition by changing the logic boards from those that made funny noises to those that sounded fine but the BIOS did not detect.
Yup, you can (easily) flash the firmware. I've flashed several Seagate disks (Barracuda IV) without any failures. :-)
Of course, one of them died shortly afterwards because I didn't cool it well enough.
I wrote this a while back -> http://www.acdev.org/sbiv_firmware/
Not only firmware differences. Some years ago I had a WD 1.6GB drive and the board went bad. I talked to WD and they said that simply swapping the board was not guaranteed to work. The reason is, for every drive, during manufacturing they tweak parameters on the board, sometimes by writing values into an EEPROM. This is done automatically by calibration equipment. Such values control head gain, servos, etc. If you merely swap boards, you run the risk of then getting marginal or erroneous performance. Even in modern drives there is still plenty of analog at the front end, and things like gain and servo tracking in the read channel are important. So this guy was lucky indeed because it was not 100% likely to work.