Question: So after a faulty PSU killed my hard drive a couple of years ago, I knew it was a PCB failure, I recently ordered a matching PCB and replaced the BIOS chip. As the hard drive spun I was excited for it to open, but it never did. It shows up on device manager but the gives error code 10, it also doesn t show up as a formattable storage. Any idea on what else to do?
Answer:Toshiba’s drives have bad protection. It could be that the preamp on the headstack is damaged. In any case, there would be no point in returning the ROM to the original PCB.
BTW, you must not damage the ROM. I know of no-one who can recover your data in such cases.
One thing you could do as an investigative measure is to bridge the fuse on the damaged board, after confirming that there are no shorts to ground at this point. Don’t bother replacing the “BIOS” – just measure the voltages between ground and each of the L3 and L2 coils. I expect that you’ll find +3.3V and +1.2V. If so, then this means that the motor controller (IC301) most probably survived.