WD 500GB WD5000AAKS Perfect Data Recovery Process

This is one case study shared by one client and he recovered the data perfectly.

“I have a WD 500GB WD5000AAKS that a customer brought and the PCB was barely working. I was able to plug it into DFL-WDII and could only back up the modules I attached to this email before the drive died completely and would not spin up again, but both diodes checked out fine. (I believe the family was Tahoe).
I found an identical PCB and when I attached it to the drive, the drive ofcourse clicked a few times, stopped, clicked a few times then stopped again. I transfered the U12 chip from the original dead PCB to the new PCB and attached it to the drive, but the drive would not spin up. I believe the original ROM is completely dead.

I moved the donor rom back to the donor board and the drive spins up and clicks then stops. I can only AutoGetDetail for it, but it won’t get SPT and I don’t know the original SPT value.

My question is, can I somehow either regenerate ROM modules for this drive or do I have enough modules backed up in the attached file to be able to reprogram this new PCB to this drive?  I also attached a screenshot of detail screen of donor PCB attached to customer’s drive. As you can see, the new PCB shows family as “ATLAN_PL”, but original PCB I believe showed family of “Tahoe”.

The boards are identical except the original one is REV P2 and the donor is REV A. Could they be different families if they have different rev numbers? The sticker on the drive also says 500GB TAHOA 65501566A. Does this also mean it’s TAHOA family? I was able to save modules 102-109 from original PCB. Is that all I need in order to regenerate ROM for this drive using a donor PCB?

For 1640, it’s a must to load module 11 to enter program, for 1640 ROM regeneration, 102-108, most of them are empty, the key modules for ROM regeneration are 109 and 40.

I was able to recover the original ROM chip using the USB programmer! I removed the dead ROM chip from the original PCB, wrote the rom I had originally backed up from it before the PCB went bad, re-soldered it to the new donor PCB and now the drive is being successfully read and in process of cloning it by DFL-DDP USB3.0 data recovery equipment.

Any more question is welcome to [email protected].