What are you trying to achieve ?

Is this for a data recovery? If so, you CANNOT just swap boards on hard drives . A board swap is more complex than that (doable with the right equipment & knowlege).

or just wanting to replace a faulty HD ?

1101:

 

What are you trying to achieve ?

 

Is this for a data recovery? If so, you CANNOT just swap boards on hard drives . A board swap is more complex than that (doable with the right equipment & knowlege).

 

or just wanting to replace a faulty HD ?

 

Actually, if you find exactly the right board it is well worth a go. I have tried 3 times in the past and been successful each time. Admittedly this was a while ago now (most recently about 4 years ago)... I don't know if anything like SMART sector maps etc are only kept in NVR or something, but it's worth a go if you aren't prepared to pony up the real $$$ for recovery.

Cheers - N

Things are different now, allways exceptions to the rule though.
https://www.donordrives.com/pcb-replacement-guide

"In many cases, the ROM or NV-RAM chip is external, and can be physically transferred (soldered) onto a new circuit board. The PCB replacement guide explains how to do this yourself. Sometimes the PCB firmware is located on the controller chip, and without a professional BGA Rework Station, it is impossible to move that chip onto a new PCB. That same controller chip is often the problem in the original PCB. In these cases, a new chip must be reprogrammed with the correct PCB firmware (which Donor Drives can generate) with access to the original failed hard drive"

Ive done a sucessfull board swap for a recovery, even though the drives had different capacity .
That was a very long time ago though, Bigfoot HD. :-)

Hmm I have the spare hard-drive, can it do any harm if I swap the pcb without changing the bios chip? I want to see if the suspect drive spins up on the new board before I go swapping the chips but can it do any harm?

Ive done a board swap between 2 identical drives - I had to move the 8 pin eeprom over for it to work tho, without that it would spin up and click a bit then shut down and become unresponsive till powercycled when it would do the same thing again. bios would see it untill the clicking stopped then nothing.

Swapped the chip over and it worked straight away. This was physical damage to the board, something fell and snagged the sata power cable and cracked that corner of the board so worst case I would have had to swap more stuff over.