Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[TemoVryce]

Hey guys. I was upgrading my system over the weekend and broke the data connector or one of my Seagate drives. I don't know the model information or firmware at this time. I do know that this drive was taken out of an external enclosure with a second identical drive.

My question is, how simple/reliable is it remove the logic board from the one drive and swap it with the broken one on the good drive. I know that in theory it should work, but I don't know if there is anything that I should be aware of before I make the attempt. 

I believe that they are both 500GB Barracuda's, but I could be wrong on the name, I know the size is right. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[fzabkar]

After reading the advice of the data recovery professionals at HDD Guru, the rule of thumb appears to be that you have to match the donor and patient drives as closely as possible -- same firmware, same model. A straight board swap *may* work, but in the event that it doesn't, you will need to desolder the original serial EEPROM from the patient and swap it with the donor. This is because the EEPROM stores the "adaptives" that were determined during factory calibration.

You can read the following articles for more information:

http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_Tracks_and_Zones.html

http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html

HDD Guru data recovery forum:

http://forum.hddguru.com/hard-disk-drives-data-recovery-and-repair-f1.html

[TemoVryce]

Thanks for the links. Some interesting reading there. As I said the damaged drive and the donner drive came from the same External Hard Drive Enclosure. They were bought as single drive in a Raid 0. I wanted them for internal drives. The price was right. So I'm hoping that the Logic Boards match.

I do have some basic soildering skills but I'm not sure if I would be able to remove and replace the chip you mentioned. Hopefully I'll be ok with just a board swap. I will post my results though. 

[TemoVryce]

Just to keep people up to date as promised. I was able to swap the logic boards and recover my data. I believe that I was able to do so because the drives came from the external drive enclosure and were likely manufactured at the same time. Thanks again for the help and advice.