Hard drive data recovery..

[brxndxn]

I have a WD 160GB (Model WD1600JB - 00DUA3) drive that got fried by my smart bro pulling the power connector out while the computer was on. (In his defense, it was plugged into a cold cathode and he meant to just pull the cold cathode out and the hard drive molex fell out too.)

I'm sure the motor in the drive works fine. But, the drive never even powers up. Instead, the circuit board on the drive just gets warm.

WD sent us a replacement 160GB (Model WD1600JB - 00EVA0). Shouldn't I be able to remove the dead circuit board from the new drive, put it on the old drive, recover the data on the old drive, put the circuit board back on the new drive and old drive, and then send it back?

The end part of the model numbers are different, but shouldn't the circuit boards be interchangeable usually?

 

[cirthix]

i did this with a maxtor, worked great. it should work with your drive too

 

[thermalpaste]

I did that with my seagate U8 series, swapped firmware. My brother dropped the U8 and the heads were kissing the platter. The other hard-disk had an older firmware, so I was just experimenting to see if there was an improvment in performance by swapping firmware. The hard disk is still working, and there was a marginal improvment in the performance.