Hard drive is fried. Pretty sure it's the logic board

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

Back in late 2008, I bought myself a 1TB WD Caviar Black Sata HD. Maybe a couple weeks to a month after I bought it, the system started getting connection failures from it. The computer would freeze up for a while, and I’d usually have to restart the machine. When I did that, the computer no longer saw the HD’s partitions.

So I turned it off, opened up the tower, wiggled around the data and power cord, started up the machine, and then they showed up again. And then the same **bleep** thing happened again days later. I tried replacing both the power and data cables, but the same things kept on happening.

I thought the whole issue was my fault; maybe I just couldn’t get the cords to stay in correctly. So I didn’t bother to take it back. Unfortunately, it kept falling out no matter how securly I put the **bleep** thing in and that finally fried the logic board. I know it’s the logic board since the platters spin just fine. The machine can still detect the drive (as the bios tells me), but windows can’t get past startup. I’ve tried this on multiple computers, and everywhere I put it the system ends up freezing. In the few instances I was able to get into windows with the thing installed, it jammed up as soon as I told it to import the HD.

It wasn’t until I was forced to do some research on this subject that I found out that the data connectors for SATA HDs are notoriously cheap. I’m rather angry about this. I mean, why did they package such a cheap and inadequate connector with the HD if it’s not to be so **bleep** sheap and inadequate in the first place!?

There are 80 gigs on this brick that I really cannot afford to lose, and forcing me to spend around $500–something I don’t have–on data recovery is simply unacceptable. So I think my best course of action is to try and replace the logic board. I hear it’s fairly simple with WD Drives. I’m assuming that WD will not do this for me (even though it would be more cost-efficient than the warranty I have on it). However, I’m curious as to whether or not they would have a special order policy where they could send me a replacement logic board and I could install it myself.

2

It’s definitly not PCB. It spins just fine.

The problem is that it locks up the system so I can’t access the data. Or if I’m able to get into the system, it jams up whenever I try to import it.

Does no one know of a policy for replacement logic boards?

3

What if you just bought a new hard drive of the exact same kind and swap out the logic boards.  Then return the new one and tell them that it doesn’t work.

4

The rule of thumb appears to be that, if a drive spins up but is not detected, or if it tries to spin up, then the board is probably OK. Instead the problem is most likely with the head/disc assembly (HDA).

If, OTOH, the drive makes no noise at all, and does not attempt to spin up, then the board is probably faulty.

When replacing the board, be prepared to transplant the 8-pin serial EEPROM chip from patient to donor. This is because the EEPROM stores drive specific calibration data determined at the factory. Some drives have the EEPROM inside the MCU, in which case professional help is needed.

When looking for a donor PCB, try to match as many digits in the DCM (Drive Configuraion Matrix ) as possible.

The following article will help you identify the components:
http://hddscan.com/doc/HDD_from_inside.html