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It's not quite a crap shoot, but I think it was either Western Digital or Maxtor(or maybe both) that used to do embed code specifically to prevent board swapping. The electronics would handshake so if you didn't have a board from the exact same month and plant the drive was produced at, it wouldn't work, but it was an artificial restriction. There's a lot of info online about doing it. But yeah, you have to match the point and time of manufacture to the nth degree. -----Original Message----- From: STeve Andre' [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 2:25 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MSUNAG] Hard Drive Restore on campus The only caution with this is to stare at both sets of electronics and look for chips with revision numbers on them, and hope they are the same. Lots of companies use programmable logic and they always have a version number associated with them and can be changed over time to fix problems, etc. Today the chips don't seem to have much in the way of identifiers, so this is hard. But changing out a board with a rev a.1 chip with an a.4 chip can break things, or hurt stuff. I did this with a WD drive around 2001 and had this horrid clattering noise when I powered the disk up. Checking everything for correct cabling suggested all was well but the noise persisted. Finally, talking with some 3rd level tech support people at WD, one person said "DON'T DO THAT!", as the boards had a major software change for recalibrates, and the old hardware didn't like the new firmware. Always a crap shoot, and always worth the "back things up" mantra for your users. ;-) --STeve Andre' On Tuesday 18 May 2010 12:57:17 Steve Bogdanski wrote: > Good tip Laurence, we've used that same process several times with > similar success. > > -Steve Bogdanski > > >>> On 5/18/2010 at 12:45 PM, Laurence Bates <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > > You might want to check into whether you have access to a working > drive of the exact same type. I have recovered quite a few hard > drives by swapping the circuit board from a known good drive. It tends > to work over 50% of the time if you can find a good matching drive. > > Laurence Bates > > -----Original Message----- > From: Joseph M. Deming [mailto:[log in to unmask]] > Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2010 12:23 PM > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: [MSUNAG] Hard Drive Restore on campus > > Are there any hard drive restoration services on campus. The > down-and-dirty kind involving clean-rooms and actual dismantling of > hardware? I suspect not, heck of a delicate and technical service, > but I am about to recommend something to a user who forgot to do their > backup, and I'm afraid he's not going to like the costs involved. Any > suggestions, on-campus or good experiences elsewhere are welcome. > > To be clear, this involves hardware that will not spin up. > > I feel this has been asked before, but I searched the archive and > failed to find anything... sry =( Found 'Data Recovery Service' from > 11/08 and entertaining discussion on Freezing, Dropping and Hitting > hard drive with mallet, but no useful names or places of businesses > still in operation. > > - Joe