Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

[karto95]

Hello everyone,

I'm currently facing an issue with my Seagate hard drive that has a damaged logic board. I've obtained a replacement logic board from a donor hard drive, but unfortunately, I'm unable to recover the BIOS of the original board due to damaged firmware. I'm wondering if it's possible to make the hard drive work with this donor logic board.

I have a CH341A programmer, so I'm hoping that it can be useful in this situation. I've attached the BIOS file .bin of the donor board for reference.

If anyone has any suggestions or experience with this type of repair, I would greatly appreciate your help. Thank you in advance!

[CapLeaker]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

I don’t think it’s going to work. If you don’t have the firmware of the original hdd that’s currently broken and you replace it (either the bios chip or the whole board) from a different HDD even so it the same make model and series, the hdd just will show up that it’s empty.

Usually you swap the firmware chip physically and don’t copy it’s contents from one to the other.

[sam_sam_sam]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

If they are the same model number and have a very similar serial number it might work because I have done it the past but one word of caution if it does work it might not work for long so I would get the files that you want to save and get them on another good drive

If you want to use the drive that you changed the control board after you retrieved the file that you want do a low level format that is write 0 and 1 to it then do a torture test to it before you even think about reusing it

[karto95]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

If they are the same model number and have a very similar serial number it might work because I have done it the past but one word of caution if it does work it might not work for long so I would get the files that you want to save and get them on another good drive

If you want to use the drive that you changed the control board after you retrieved the file that you want do a low level format that is write 0 and 1 to it then do a torture test to it before you even think about reusing it

The issue is that, despite replacing the logic board with an identical one, the PC is unable to detect the hard disk. Although the hard disk powers on, it is not being recognized, leading me to believe that I might be making a mistake somewhere.

[harp]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

I am working with 1tb hdd similar simptoms, not detected... and found that one chip is heating. It was sign to me that this is end of the road, end of story, no replacement. No short on 5 and 12, input diodes and fuses good, all caps no short to ground... but, in detailed measurement of everything I notice that one cap on one side get say 12v and on another 11.2v... hmmm...
That caps was not connected to ground anyway. After replacing that cap, with simmilar dimension, disk start normaly working... cap have a resistance, I dont remember but isnt too low... no beeping, so check every cap voltage difference...

BTW, you didn't use a soic clip onboard, do you?

[karto95]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

I am working with 1tb hdd similar simptoms, not detected... and found that one chip is heating. It was sign to me that this is end of the road, end of story, no replacement. No short on 5 and 12, input diodes and fuses good, all caps no short to ground... but, in detailed measurement of everything I notice that one cap on one side get say 12v and on another 11.2v... hmmm...
That caps was not connected to ground anyway. After replacing that cap, with simmilar dimension, disk start normaly working... cap have a resistance, I dont remember but isnt too low... no beeping, so check every cap voltage difference...

BTW, you didn't use a soic clip onboard, do you?

I used the clip

[harp]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

I heard somewhere that it is not good to use a clip directly on the pcb board, it may leads to error.
You use some addapter on ch341, what is chip labeled?
Is package exact soic8?
So, what you get when try to read original firmware?
Sometimes clip does not good contact with chip legs due to thin layer of flux, I always gently scrap all legs with screwdriver before biting a chip.

[karto95]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

I heard somewhere that it is not good to use a clip directly on the pcb board, it may leads to error.
You use some addapter on ch341, what is chip labeled?
Is package exact soic8?
So, what you get when try to read original firmware?
Sometimes clip does not good contact with chip legs due to thin layer of flux, I always gently scrap all legs with screwdriver before biting a chip.

I can't extract the firmware, it's probably damaged but I'm not sure, it would have been easier if I had an air soldering iron. The clip is SOP8.
CHIP is 25FS406

[harp]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

You can easely desolder soic8 and simmilar package just with soldering iron. Important is that have as big soldering tip and lot of tin, like blob. Pretin legs with fresh solder-tin that its shiny, excess solder dont remove. Make a rectangle ring of thick copper wire, just to fit outline ic chip, and put it on chip, flux it and fill gap between legs and wire with solder... when both side are melted, lift chip and remove rectangle...
I'll try to find some video to see.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVsmwFAkf7I
Desoldering without hot air

[Per Hansson]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

^^Yep, and when you have removed the chip if you still can't read it:
Try to heat it up, try reading a few times.
If it does not work try cooling it down, and try again and again.
You can also try pressing the chip between your fingers, sometimes there is a micro crack in a lead and this might make it give contact long enough to dump the chip.
In all likelyhood you need the data that is on it, it is also not possible to low level format a drive like sam said above, there is an abstraction layer between the data on the drive and the interface.
This is why you need the data that is on the chip, each drive will be different...

[noppa]

Re: Repairing a Seagate hard drive with damaged logic board

If you damage the rom chip on these F3 Seagate it's GAME OVER...

Few people in the world claims that they can recover data from
these drives.
If data is really important stop messing with the drive and ask
for a professional solution, else make a post on hddguru or
HDD Oracle.

BTW a proper diagnose of the drive would have been necessary,
those PCB rarely fails (and most likely for a bad supply) and
the problem is internal.