swap HD controller to recover data from bad disk?

[Guest_jon]

I've read about how its possible to recover data from a hard disk with a bad controller by swapping out the controller with a working one of the same make.

my question is does this still work on newer drives?

I have a western digital 200gig special edition and its giving me smart errors and won't access the disk, the disk won't show up in windows or dos so recovery programs don't help. but the bios does detect it and the drive doesn't make any noises such as clicking.

western digital is RMAing me a new drive and it seems like the controller board just clicks into place after taking out a couple screws, so would it be worth trying to swap them or does it sound like the drive is completely dead?

[Guest]

is it spining? pick it up and hodl it as u turn on pc and u will feel twisting feelign. allso soem drives i heard have data onboard about bad sectors so im not sure if it will work on all drives. btt yess u have a high chance of recovery.

BTW grab soem tape and a cable and ground yourself to your pc before openign drive. :-p

[Guest]

yes the drive spins up. but i can't access it as a logical drive, heres some more info:

I have other drives, this drive was the only one on a PCI promise ultra controller card. i've tried the drive in another computer (with updated bios etc to support it) and still can't access it, it doesn't even show up in disk management (admin tools).

I ran the western digital diagnostics and get errors every time, they used to be 0007- smart error, 0255 - too many errors, and now i'm getting 0003. I've tried the drive in several different jumper configs, slave/master/alone nothing changes. I called WD and they said its dead due to a static buildup.

seeing as how the drive spins up and doesn't make any odd noises, i was hoping that only the controller was bad and i could swap them

well I suppose it could be a virus, but the drive gave me some other problems before the symptoms i'm experiencing now. I lost data and then the drive would detect every now and then until finally it didn't show up in windows at all. I'll try running a dos virus program and see what happens. also i tried some programs such as spinrite 5 and hard drive mechanic and they didn't get me anywhere.

ok i tried swapping controllers, didn't do anything. the drive just powered on/off a few times and hung before loading windows. i'm out of ideas, stupid drive. i can't even do commands like 'fdisk /mbr' or even 'fdisk', it says cannot read fixed disk. so i guess its really dead...