WD800 PCB recovery?

[h333rdforum]

I fried my Western Digital wd800jb-00cra1 HD 6yr ago. (http://img394.imageshack.us/img394/7161/wd800pcb.jpg)
Tinkering around with the HD the PCB popped off easily leading me to think data recovery could be simple by replacing the PCB with a new one.

I read the PCB needs to be an exact match as HD has numerous revisions.
Anyone have experience doing this? Worth trying?

 

[xenotype]

Have no experience with doing it myself, but all in all it depends on how valuable the data on that drive is. You could probably find the same hard drive for under 40 bux on ebay or craigslist, but the firmware revisions, and PCB revisions, would be difficult to ascertain, especially from a novice seller.

There are others on this forum that have done it successfully, try searching the forums with "PCB swap"

 

[airbatica]

I've done a PCB swap with a WD300BB that suddenly quit working. It took me a few weeks, but I found a drive with an identical model number and firmware revision on eBay. I'm still using that repaired drive as the boot disk for my file server. If the data is worth recovering, IMO its worth a shot.

 

[extide]

Works great, I have done it several times, just find another identical drive.