www.deadharddrive.com

[ELI]

Hello,

I am wondering if anyone can help me out. I am looking for as much help as I can get. I am going to post this in a few forums and see what happens.

I have a WD3200JB 00KFA0 (IDE hard drive).

My Operating system is Xp Home Edition SP3 (Legal copy)

On the board it has these numbers :
2060-701314-003 REV A

On the sticker it has these numbers :
2061-701314-A00 AP XT .... .... . ....... . ... (The dots represent other numbers that I dont think mean anything...)

DCM : HHCACAJAAN

DATE : 22 NOVEMBER 2006

My computer shut down on me and when it restarted it had a few errors, (dll error of some kind.) so I restarted it again and it would not fire up. It said : Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

At that point it was still recognized on device manager but not in disk management. I did the windows test from Western Digitals site. Data Lifeguard tool I think. (I downloaded it to another pc) and it told me that the test could not be done because of a cable error. (I forget the exact error.) So I called Western Digital and the guy was telling me to shut it down and restart it and do a bunch of different things to see if I could see it anywhere. So then a few restarts and I could no longer see it anywhere. Bios would not recognize or boot the drive. So then I totally lost power with it and it would not spin up and it is not recognized anywhere.

Western Digital basically told me the disk is bad and there is nothing they could do for me but warranty it and suggest a place that could recover the data for a price. So I checked out a few places and got quotes that were RIDICULOUS TO ME. The more I looked into data recovery the more money I seen they charge. LOL! I guess I just cant justify paying that much to do it. Maybe it does take lots of time so I cant blame them for what they charge, but I dont want to have to pay that.

I have pictures and files on there that I would like to salvage. Its personal to me. I cant afford and dont want to pay the big money to a company to fix this. After doing a bunch of research on google and looking at any thread that I could find on it I felt that IT MAY BE THE pcb. I took it off my drive and then looked at it and the only thing I seen was it looked burnt a bit on one leg of the MOTOR CONTROL CHIP. One leg was basically burnt off of it. The chip was not melted or anything and the pad that was under the pcb was slightly burnt where the Motor Control chip was. So off to ebay I went and ended up buying a hard drive that had the date of OCTOBER 2005 (I forget the exact day) and the sticker number was the same, but the board read a 2060-701314-002 REV A instead of 2060-701314-003 REV A and needless to say, it did not work. It powered up and it made tick tick sound and then stopped and 5 seconds later tick tick and stop... It did this about 4 times and then it would say that it failed. I should also mention that I put this drive in a few different computers with XP PRO Edition and XP Home Edition and tried to see if I would see the data when running it as a slave drive.... So with this board, Bios would recognize it as WDC ROM MODEL-BUCCANER- 0805J08. (That is when it would recognize it.) So I gave up on that board. Then I got my replacement from WD and I was amazed that the drive they sent me had the absolute identical board as my original one. The only difference was the year. (Mine said 2004 and the new one said 2006) So I tried that out and same thing happened as the last one. tick tick... tick tick.... then it would not be recognized in bios half the time and when it did, it would recognize it as WDC ROM MODEL-BUCCANER- 0805J08. So after a bunch more researching, I decided to try the U12 swap off of my original pcb and the new one from Western Digital. I dont solder, so I finally found a guy to do it for me and he was confident that he could do it and said that he done it before, he said he just has to take his time to do it and time is money... LOL. So I went there and he did it for me in 45 minutes and charged me 35 bucks... I got home and tried it out and same thing.... But the only difference was it recognized it in bios as WDC ROM MODEL-BUCCANER- 08.05J08 (There is a DOT after the 8 now) I tried rebooting it a million times and now it rarely even finds it in bios but it still ticks twice, about 4 or 5 different times and then tells me primary slave failed to boot.

The only thing I wish I would have done was tried the NEW DRIVE from Western Digital to see if it worked from the start before taking the pcb off of it. (Might have been faulty from the start.) So I ended up trying the pcb back on the new drive that I originally took the pcb off of (Keep in mind the U12 chip is off the original burnt pcb) and it did some ticking noises and was recognized in bios as WDC ROM MODEL-BUCCANER- 08.05J08. So I just shut it off right away and took the pcb back off and put it on the hard drive that I am trying to salvage. So then I tried new ribbon cables and tried running it stand alone in the pc and still nothing... It recognizes it sometimes in bios as WDC ROM MODEL-BUCCANER- 08.05J08 and then when I try to boot it just tells me that it failed to boot.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I did the Data lifeguard test and it gave me ERROR/STATUS CODE : 0132 Command Error. (This was off the floppy boot disk test.)

I want to ask if I could change the disks inside the drive. If I could take them out of mine and put them in a donor hard drive. (The one I bought from ebay.) Will it all work? From what I also understand, there is firmware inside the drive. So my question would be, why cant I just change the disks inside my drive (If I find a clean room work area) and put them in the donor one that works perfectly fine?

I have a 80GB WD drive that is no good and I was thinking of taking that apart just to look at it and see how it works.

I am also thinking of looking for another pcb that was manufactured sometime in November of 2006 and early December of 2006. The only reason I was thinking about trying this again is for the fact that I did not try to pwer up the new hard drive that I originally took the pcb off of. I am curious on whether or not it would have made a difference that I did not format the hard drive before trying the pcb from it. (This was a new drive that WD SENT ME on warranty.)

I also want to ask if anyone can suggest anything from here.

What shoud I try next, other then professional recovery services?

Thank you in advance for any responses.

[RussWinters]

Formatting the drive would not have made a difference.

Do not open the drive in a normal environment. Your data will be lost forever. You need a clean room environment capable of 10 particles of dust per square foot, your typical room in a house has 1000000 particles per square foot; even a small microscopic particle that is as small as .03microns can damage the platters. To put things in perspective .03microns is the size of some larger bacteria.


This drive likely has either corrupt firmware or damaged heads. Professional diagnosis and repair is really the only path to go if you want the data back. These WD drives are the toughest to work on; even seasoned professionals break a sweat working on these drives as WD desktop drives have issues with alignment of heads as soon as you loosen the center lid screw.


If the data is truly important; put it aside until you can afford to get it recovered. As long as you stop powering on the drive and let it sit; it shouldn't matter if it sits for 2 years it will still be recoverable.


If you do become interested in professional recovery I may be able to help.

PM me if your interested, or if you have any other questions at all


Best regards,

Russ

[ELI]

Thank you for your reply Russ. Seems like you have some experience. Do you do this for a living? If so, where do you work?

Lets just say that its a firmware problem or a damaged head/heads problem. What do you charge to fix this. Is there any simple way that a normal person with a windows based computer can put firmware onto a new/used pcb card? I thought that I read somewhere online that someone did this and fixed their problem, but I cant find the thread. I also read about a guy that sent his pcb to some guy and he charged him 50 bucks and flashed the firmware onto a different pcb and it fixed his problem.

I think that I am going to try to find a pcb board/hard drive that was made as close to the date as mine. (There has got to be some out there that were made the same day as mine... I hope. LOL!) The only reason I am going to try this is because I did not even try to power the new hard drive when I got it. So maybe it was no good to start... If the hard drive works and powers up perfectly and then I put it on mine and it does not work, then chances are that it would not be right.... I dont think that I should bother with the U12 swap again...

Thanks again.