No soldering required.

I went on a bit of a spending spree several months ago to purchase replacement boards for my three broken hard drives. The drives themselves were good, but the boards they were using were fried, as could be seen from the scorch marks on each of them. Fortunately the BIOS chips were still good so I could get them back up and running so long as I could find replacement boards for each one.

Well, I was planning to do this for a several years now. But getting the drives fixed was not a high priority and they sat at the bottom of a box or bucket for that time. When we started to move around everywhere I noticed them more because I had to move them and hard drives are not light. Eventually, I decided to do something before I moved out of my parent's house.

I found replacement boards available on eBay and quickly purchased them. Two were from Data Rescue Laps and the third board was from Fast Moose Tech. One drive worked after the transplant and I purged the data off it it. Due to the nature of the boards, not all drives will work if the boards were swapped. Some had to have the BIOS chips transplanted as well. Unfortunately this requires a heat gun which I did not have. My dad had a heat pen, which I found out later was too focused and too hot. I think I fried the replacement board.

After that unfortunate incident I decided to take the remaining good replacement board to an electronic shop (after searching through a dozen and calling up half a dozen other shops and being told that they didn't do this sort of stuff). The guy agreed to swap chips, and a few days later it was done, and it worked! I quickly purged the data off it after confirming that there was nothing on there I needed and left the third one sit on the floor for a while.

Well, last week I decided to finish this project. I did another quick search and found a replacement board from HDD Parts. Since it was for one of the BIOS swap drives, I was prepared to bring the drive back to the electronics store to do the swap, but when I opened the box, I found simple instructions to replace the board and as a bonus, they included a matching Torx screwdriver! How thoughtful!

I figured I had nothing to lose, so I swapped the drive, plugged it in, and.. it worked! No need for a BIOS swap. I quickly took what I needed off the drive and the next step is to purge it. Wow, a lot easier than it looked.

Now I was planning on bringing in this netbook as well to get looked at but now there isn't a need for me to go to the shop, so maybe I'll take a quick look to see what might be wrong with it..