www.deadharddrive.com

[electrician]

As I am a newbie here, I' like to congratulate all members for sharing their knowledge and experience!

As regards my question, I have burnt the PCB of my Raptor WD360ADFD due to a rubbish power brick, so I'm looking for a replacement.

Unfortunately, can't find an identical hdd until now.

Should I prefer
- A PCB removed from a drive with the same MDL (WD360ADFD-00NLR1) and DCM (HBCA2AB), regardless the number on the PCB sticker
or
- A PCB with identical sticker string (13 numbers + 2 letters), but removed from another Raptor model

[geekster]

I would go for the pcb with correct part number, assuming the chips are the same that is probably your best bet. it having the same part number would mean its an acceptable replacement, the thing that matter more is now going to be how different the drives where it came off of.

Best solid bet would be to remove the eprom off of the dead pcb and solder in place of the eprom from the new pcb, if you know how to do that your odds go up drastically, the tuning/adjustment codes from the old drive are in your old eprom, and yes they can be different even when everything is the same and can be quite different per drive too. So your replacement boards code might not be the same, it might not even be for the same geometry which would guarantee a failure. Even if it is a working pcb, the code in the eprom is what gets the heads to the actual tracks of data. The other side of that reality is cards are also different electrically even when they are the same, the tuning info is what essentially matches the two sides together. Newer drives this matter much more, old drives, not so much. If you get it working backup your data INSTANTLY, there is not guarantee that your resurrected drive continues to function so be ready with backup drive hooked to system when you first power on.

HTH

[electrician]

geekster, thank you for replying.
I have some experience with firmware chips swaping. Recently, I managed to get a dead WD 80GB fully functional again, despite the non-identical PCBs!

But I'm afraid of trying a PCB from a larger HDD.

It's not so urgent to restore my data, so I'll rather look for a closer match....