Hello guys,
so I have this Western Digital WD Elements (one of those without SATA
connectors, USB only) which suddenly stopped working laying around since
a while, and I decided to try to resurrect it.
When connected to a PC it lights up, motor starts spinning (no weird
noises, seems just like as it should do) but nothing shows up. Tried
different PCs, cables, OS, nothing. Just light and spinning.
I opened it up and looks like it's PCB is a bit oxidated. Cleaned it with proper products, but still got the same issues.
So I bought another new and *absolutely identical* PCB (2060-771961-001 rev b).
I managed to recover the firmware from the old PCB with a CH431a eeprom
programmer, and to successfully flash the same chip (U12) on the new PCB
with it.
Well, guess what, with its new PCB ithe hdd lights up, the OS recognizes
it, but the motor doesn't spin and so windows tells me that I have to
initialize the disk but it fails I I try so (obviously, as it doesn't
move inside).
Do you guys have some advice with it? What did I miss? I still have both PCBs.
I've also a backup of both U12 and U14 of both PCB's, however the U14 of
the old one looks "incomplete", half of the backup is just a lot of
"FF" in hex. I've done multiple backups to ensure i got no bad readings.
Also, I managed to upgrade the firmware on the new PCB using an official WD tool. It worked, but it didn't help.
Thank you so much!!!