Board fried! WD5000AADS swap

[vineyarddna]

WD 500 Gb

Circuit board pics

Hard drive (board) fried - burnng smell. Hard drive will not spin or make any sounds, it just get extremely hot in one particular area on the board.

I have data that is extremely meaningful to me (years of photo collections)

Can the board be replaced or repaired?

I called some data doctor companies and they want $500 - $1200 so much money! 

Can i just buy another board or drive and swap boards- seems so easy to swap. It looks like my data should be intact - just a board issue.

Please help me...

Doug

[Wizer]

Well this is a very intricate process

you can try this page http://www.donordrives.com/

[HDDRS]

Smooth chip failure is a very common thing for WD 3.5" drives. In your case its not DIY type of process even if you have an identical board. If you look on the position of U12 chip you will see that it is absent from your board. That means there is no external adaptive data that can be transferred to a donor board. Chances of getting the drive working without matching adaptive data are close to none. You'd need equipment that can reconstruct it, and write it to the donor board.

[vineyarddna]

HDDRS-

you said- 

Smooth chip failure is a very common thing for WD 3.5" drives. In your case its not DIY type of process even if you have an identical board. If you look on the position of U12 chip you will see that it is absent from your board. That means there is no external adaptive data that can be transferred to a donor board. Chances of getting the drive working without matching adaptive data are close to none. You'd need equipment that can reconstruct it, and write it to the donor board.

****************

Thank you very much for your insight. I contacted donordrives.com and they mentioned that they have a board and can do the adaption process. I am pretty green to all of this and have never heard of this process. But in your opinion with the purchase of a donor board/new board and this adaption process is it reasonable to expect the drive to run again at least enough to get my data off?

Thanks

Doug

[HDDRS]

the drive after getting fixed should work like it did before the power surge.