Question about replacing engine board on HDD

Darkst4r · 2 May 2010 at 16:35

Hi, I have a hard drive that has failed after about 4 years of use. It will not detect in the bios or in windows and does not seem to power up atall. I have tried all the other tricks of trying to loosen the platters but I can hear them freely spinning when I gently rotate it so I reckon it's the PCB that has had it. I managed to remove the old one very easily and was wondering if replacing it with an identical board from the same brand drive would maybe bring it back to life long enough for me to salvage my photos and if so would it have to be the identical capacity or just the brand and model ?

Cheers

AbsenceJam · 3 May 2010 at 12:59

If it was the board it would have to be an identical board, exact same revision and firmware.

randal · 3 May 2010 at 13:07

I've managed to pull this off once, but like AbsenceJam says it has to be an identical board for it to work.

Friend of mine tried to do the same with a 500gb Seagate and ended up buying 4 500gb drives trying to get the right version, think he gave up in the end.

What drive have you got?

Darkst4r · 3 May 2010 at 13:31

Its an old Maxtor Diamondmax 9 160gb IDE.