swap onboard controller on hard drive to rescue data?

I've read about how its possible to recover data from a hard disk with a bad controller board by swapping out the controller with a working one of the same make. When i say controller i mean the one attached to the drive itself, not the motherboard IDE controller.

my question is does this still work on newer drives(mines from late 2002?)

I have a western digital 200gig special edition and its giving me smart errors and won't access the disk at all, the disk won't show up in windows or dos, so recovery programs don't help as they can't see a partition. but the bios does detect it and the drive doesn't make any noises, such as clicking.

western digital is RMAing me a new drive and it seems like the controller board just clicks into place(no soldering) after taking out a couple screws, so would it be worth trying to swap them when i get the new drive....or does it sound like the drive is completely dead?

This article seems to think it'll work.

http://techrepublic.com.com/5100-6255-1053837.html

There's even a few links that might help you out.

Be interesting to see how this plays out for you,

Good luck,
Tom

could be wrong but i dont think the drive is bad. do you have other drives on the same computer? if so what are there jumper settings and which devices are on the cables with other devices? did anything odd happen before this occured, or do you use p2p programs? was this drive used for storage or the os?

yeah that article was interesting, but they talk about the drive being older and mines less than a year old. i've done a million searches on this topic but only managed to dig up a couple sites, maybe i'm using the wrong keywords?



yes i have other drives, this drive was the only one on a PCI promise ultra controller card. i've tried the drive in another computer (with updated bios etc to support it) and still can't access it, it doesn't even show up in disk management (admin tools).

I ran the western digital diagnostics and get errors every time, they used to be 0007- smart error, 0255 - too many errors, and now i'm getting 0003. I've tried the drive in several different jumper configs, slave/master/alone nothing changes. I called WD and they said its dead due to a static buildup.

seeing as how the drive spins up and doesn't make any odd noises, i was hoping that only the controller was bad and i could swap them. My only concern is that WD would be able to tell that i messed with the drive and not accept a return?

if you swap controller cards they will know, because the warrenty(markings) will be broke, the tape and paint they use to tell. since they are sending you the new drive first, i dont know if they can bill you or not. i dont know what they could do. doubt they would take you to court over it. the reason i said i didnt think the drive was bad is i have had several machines come in with some boot virus, being the situation is as you described i have not been able to tell what virus. i use the low level packet write that erases back to raw disk and they worked fine after repartitioning and formatting. just lost everything that was on the drive.(i understand your main goal is to save the info on the drive) the people that owned the computers i delt with were just happy not to have to buy anything. this may not be the case, you may have a bad drive, but then again i have a stack of hard drives people give me for parts that work very well after a packet write. for some reason people think i run a home for wayward computer parts, it aint so bad actually, i get alot of nice stuff, alot of it hits the trash as soon as they leave.

well I suppose it could be a virus, but the drive gave me some other problems before the symptoms i'm experiencing now. I lost data and then the drive would detect every now and then until finally it didn't show up in windows at all. I'll try running a dos virus program and see what happens. also i tried some programs such as spinrite 5 and hard drive mechanic and they didn't get me anywhere.

i tried another program, media tools pro 2003, the programs can't even get access to the drive. The bios sees it and thats all, its a smart failure of some sort and i'm 99% its not a virus.

the WD replacement arrived today, i'm debating whether or not to swap controller boards....i looked for paint/tape warranty markings but i didn't see anything. theres about 5 star screws holding it in place.

should i try it? is there anyway i can break the new controller by putting it on the old drive? (they look identical)

let me know what u think

ok i tried swapping controllers, didn't do anything. the drive just powered on/off a few times and hung before loading windows. i'm out of ideas, stupid drive. i can't even do commands like 'fdisk /mbr' or even 'fdisk', it says cannot read fixed disk. so i guess its really dead and my 200 gigs of data is lost forever, damn it.

I am feeling your pain. I am in the same situation and own a 9 month old internal harddrive(Maxtor) with 70GB worth of data and a dead drive controller board(no spinning or power what so ever). It is expensive but I may have to ship it out to get professionally recovered if I can't find someone to repair/replace the drive board (or drive motor, god forbid). What ever happened in your case? I hope things worked out. Can you provide any advice for me?

-Al